Forge of Darkness Quotes

“When one loves all things of the world, when one has that gift of joy, it is not the armour against grief that you might think it to be. Such a person stands balanced on the edge of sadness – there is no other way for it, because to love as he does is to see clearly.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Peace did not serve order; order served peace, and when order became godlike, sacrosanct and inviolate, then the peace thus won became a prison, and those who sought their freedom became enemies to order, and in the elimination of such enemies, peace was lost.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“One day, I will be a child again. Carved toys will caper and dance from my mind, out across rock I will raise as mountains. Through grasses I will proclaim forests. For too long I have been trapped in this world of measures, proportions and scale. For too long I have known and understood the limits of what is possible, so cruel in rejecting all that can be imagined. In this way, friend, we are each of us not one but two lives, for ever locked in mortal combat, and from all things at hand, we make weapons.’ - Hust Henarald”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“There was, in his mind, no truer measure of stupidity than to imagine that the world could be reduced to two sides,”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind. But who listens to the wind?”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“The greatest gift of education, Korya, is the years of shelter provided when learning. Do not think to reduce that learning to facts and the utterances of presumed sages. Much of what one learns in that time is in the sphere of concord, the ways of society, the proprieties of behaviour and thought. Haut would tell you that this is another hard-won achievement of civilization: the time and safe environment in which to learn how to live. When this is destroyed, undermined or discounted, then that civilization is in trouble.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Conviction is a fist of stone at the heart of all things. Its form is shaped by sure hands, the detritus quickly swept from view. It is built to withstand, built to defy challenge, and when cornered it fights without honour. There is nothing more terrible than conviction.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“If holy words could not offer up an answer to despair, then what good were they? If the truths so revealed did not invite restitution, then their utterance was no more than a curse. And if the restitution is found not in the mortal realm, then we are invited to inaction, and indifference. Will you promise to a soul a reward buried in supposition? Are we to reach throughout our lives but never touch? Are we to dream and to hope, but never know?”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out. Betrayers came from everywhere, including inside his own body, his own mind. He could trust no one, not even himself.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Rely not upon conscience,’ Feren said, hearing the bitterness in her own voice and not caring. ‘It ever kneels to necessity.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Wisdom did not belong to mortals, and those whom others called wise were only those who, through grim experience, had touched the very edges of unwelcome truths. For the wise, even joy was tinged with sorrow.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Faith is a personal accord between a lone soul and that in which it chooses to believe. In any other guise it is nothing more than a thin coat of sacred paint slapped over politics and the secular lust for power.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“There is but one god, and its name is beauty. There is but one kind of worship, and that is love. There is for us but one world, and we have scarred it beyond recognition.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Most bravery, dear little one,’ he said as he pulled the dog from the water and rested it across the back of his thickly muscled neck, ‘is marked by a strength less than imagined, and a hope farther from reach than one expects.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Crowd control.’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘That’s all civilization is, T’riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keep us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“The last act of an historian, priest, is to live through history. It is the bravest act of them all, because it faces, unblinking, the recognition that all history is personal, and that every external truth of the world is but a reflection of our internal truths – the truths that shape our behaviours, our decisions, our fears, our purposes and our appetites. These internal truths raise monuments and flood sewers. They lift high grand works as readily as they fill graves. If you blame one appetite you blame all of our appetites. We all swim the same river.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“I cannot help what I am – and that is the first lie, the one I uttered to myself long ago.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“A civilization for ever within easy reach of a blade had little to boast about.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Against ignorance there is no front line. Against viciousness no border can hold. It breeds as readily behind your back as elsewhere.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Evil is at its boldest when it walks an unerring path.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Belief creates, Arathan. So you have been taught. The god cannot exist until it is worshipped, until it is given shape, personality. It is made in the crucible of faith.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“They are a generation that has tasted blood, and where horror fades, nostalgia seeps in. In war all is simple, and there is appeal in this. Who among us is comforted by confusion, uncertainty?”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Love had no limbs at all. It could neither run nor grasp, couldn’t even push away though it tried and tried. Left lying on the ground, unable to move, crying like an abandoned baby – people could steal it; people could kick it until it bled, or nudge it down a hillside or over a cliff. They could smother it, drown it, set it on fire until it was ashes and charred bone. They could teach it how to want and want for ever, no matter how much it was fed. And sometimes, all love was, was something to be dragged behind on a chain, growing heavier with each step, and when the ground opened up under it, why, it pulled a person backwards and down, down to a place where the pain never ended.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Gifts are rarely appreciated,' Arathan said, and in his mind he was remembering his first night with Feren. 'And the one who receives knows only confusion. At first. And then hunger... for more. And in that hunger, there is expectation, and so the gift ceases being a gift, and becomes payment, and to give itself becomes a privilege and to receive it a right. By this all sentiment sours.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“We were convinced of the inherent madness of codified inequity. All cooperation involves some measure of surrender. And coercion. But the alternative, being anarchy, is itself no worthy virtue. It is but an excuse for selfish aggression, and all that seeks justification from taking that stance is, each and every time, cold-hearted. Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin. [...] We rejected civilization, but so too we rejected anarchy for its petty belligerence and the weakness of thought it announced. By these decisions, we made ourselves lost and bereft of purpose.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Because they imply a unity that does not exist. Only rarely does a life have a theme, and even then such themes exist in confusion and uncertainty, and are only described by others once that life has come to an end. A tale is the binding of themes to a past, because no tale can be told as it is happening.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“Too many strive for the unachievable, and this pursuit consumes them. They rush frantic and desperate and so reveal weakness in the face of sadness. More than weakness, in fact. It is in truth a kind of cowardice, that which espouses an evasive disposition as if it were a virtue.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“There are no singular tales. A life in solitude is a life rushing to death. But a blind man will never rush; he but feels his way, as befits an uncertain world.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness

“There were no ugly gods. Their first expression of power was in the reshaping of their selves, into forms lovely to behold.”
― Steven Erikson, Forge of Darkness