The God is Not Willing Quotes

“The stupid knew better than to look into their wake. The wise could not help it and so suffered greatly. This was humanity’s great divide, and many a time, Damisk had envied the stupid and all the obstinate incomprehension he saw in their eyes and faces. In the end, it takes wisdom to scream.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Innocence,’ she whispered. The one thing we all leave behind, alas. The one thing we all walk away from, sooner or later. Oh yes, you can look back and call it ignorance instead. But you do that because you’ve forgotten what you lost.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness

“Longing. Look for it, in every crowd, and you will find it. Paint it any colour you choose: grief, nostalgia, melancholy, remembrance, these are but flavours, poetic reflections.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Lad, the most powerful constant is stupidity. Nothing else comes close. Stupidity kills all the animals, empties the sky of birds, poisons the rivers, burns the forests, wages the wars, feeds the lies, invents the world over and over again in ways only idiots could think real. Stupidity, lad, will defeat every god, crush every dream, topple every empire. Because, in the end, stupid people outnumber smart people. If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t suffer over and over again, through generation after generation and on for ever.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“The present age is only unique because you live in it. When you die, you cease to care about that age. And you know this. Which is why you don’t care about anything past your own life. Why should you? It follows, quite reasonably, that every generation is righteous in cursing the one that precedes it. Namely, yours. And the vicious fighting withdrawal that is your own conservatism – this bitter, hate-filled war against change – is doomed to fail, because no age lasts for ever. One follows upon the next and this is an inescapable fact. So step aside. Your day is done. Any regression into childish tantrums makes a mockery of wisdom. The age dies with you, as it must, and you now show its face to be that of a mewling child who can no longer hold on to what has ceased to exist. Synthraeas”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness

“A career devoted to a single cog loses sight of the machinery, forgets the purpose of the mill, grows deaf to the water in the vast wheel, and thinks nothing of the grain’s birth in the bread devoured.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“You do not turn away. You do not rush back to your own life, your own world, and tell yourself that your family, your loved ones, are all that matters. Were they indeed all that mattered, then in your world not one person who’s not you or your family would give a flying fuck about you, or them. And in a world like that, why, it might well be better to be dead than alive.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Being a soldier is the opposite of being rich, and if you’d grown up where I did you’d know that. And that’s another thing. My father and all the other rich people, they have no problem seeing soldiers as their servants. Problem is, they expect those soldiers to be serving only them. Not anyone else. Not the poor, that’s for sure. And why do they expect that? Why, because they’re rich! Real trouble starts when the soldiers buy in to that and end up serving only them. That’s fucked up. And that brings me to the marines, where not giving a fuck about how rich someone happens to be is pretty much our credo.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness

“To be believed in is an obligation. Only by heeding that obligation are you made worthy of that belief.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness

“What gesture will you make, to announce to all the true colour of your soul? How long will we all wait for you to find your courage?”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“And now he was full of words, full of thoughts that had nowhere to go. He imagined that this was what it meant to be lonely. An entire inner world with no way out, no audience or witnesses. If there was beauty in there, none could see it. If there was torment, no one could hear the cries for help.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“To live is to lose the faith you were born with to a thousand cuts, each year bleeding into the next. The eyes of the innocent see a world very differently from what you and I see. To know this is to revisit one's own loss, eye to eye with sad reflection, and to feel once more that dreadful ache in your chest.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Stupid people always had a reason to be angry but didn’t have the capacity to understand that they were angry because they were frustrated”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“The dead didn’t need to accuse, but they did it anyway. They did it in their own way. No words, obviously, and no gestures, either. They did it by not moving, by the lifeless faces and the empty eyes, the pale flesh – all the signs of their souls’ absence.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“It’s just how people are. Warm in one direction, cold as ice in another.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“It wouldn’t be happiness but then, happiness wasn’t kind anyway, the way it could vanish in an instant.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“It’s all poison, Anyx Fro, take it from me. Being rich fucks people up, in their heads. Their hearts, too. They pamper the outside to hide the rot inside.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Some bastard had damn well better be waiting on the other side. Iskar Jarak, fix your cold, lifeless eyes upon each soul that arrives. Ignore the wheedling, the self-pity, the cries that we didn’t know any better. We did know better. We’ve always known better.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“The present age is only unique because you live in it. When you die, you cease to care about that age. And you know this. Which is why you don’t care about anything past your own life. Why should you? It follows, quite reasonably, that every generation is righteous in cursing the one that precedes it. Namely, yours. And the vicious fighting withdrawal that is your own conservatism – this bitter, hate-filled war against change – is doomed to fail, because no age lasts for ever. One follows upon the next and this is an inescapable fact. So step aside. Your day is done. Any regression into childish tantrums makes a mockery of wisdom. The age dies with you, as it must, and you now show its face to be that of a mewling child who can no longer hold on to what has ceased to exist.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Stupidity needed no allies among the wise, because there was nothing out there that could challenge it.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“A soul collects marks, Rant. Like you’d find on a factor’s ledger. Some are burned into the surface. Some are placed there with a kiss. Forget good and evil, right and wrong. Think instead in terms of suffering and blessing.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“There wasn’t much in Damisk’s past that he was proud of, and there wasn’t much of the world that he liked. At least, not when it came to the world of people. Too many of them were stupid. They couldn’t think clearly enough to save their lives. The worst part was, they didn’t know they were stupid. Every failure had an excuse, every loss was someone else’s fault.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“To bear witness, perhaps. Because to do otherwise would not only be the act of a coward, it would also be an act of disrespect. And it was not just the bodies of Malazan marines below—the bodies of friends and comrades lost—but all the others as well. Especially the children, and there were so many children.

What sort of person could turn away from such a scene? Shutting off all feeling, all humanity?

It was a ritual, he eventually decided, but a ritual in the proper sense of the term. Not quite a rite of passage—that would be too ghastly a price from any one place to the next—but something that simply needed to be done.

You do not turn away

You do not rush back to your own life, your own world, and tell yourself that your family, your loved ones, are all that matters. Were they indeed all that mattered, then in your world not one person who's not you or your family would give a flying fuck about you, or them. And in a world like that, why, it might well be better to be dead than alive.

Or it was something else. He might be way off in his thinking and there was reason to suspect that he was. After all, those very thoughts left him seething with rage. And fear—fear that such a world was possible, that such a world could in fact exist. Fear, yes, that such a world could be found even here in his own world, in a land and among people not too far away.

Cowardice had a hundred thousand faces, after all. In most of them, the eyes were squeezed shut.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“What sort of person could turn away from such a scene? Shutting off all feeling, all humanity?”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Some fathers, he realized, were not of the blood.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Continuity is an illusion. Unseen forces work to their own ends. On this day, then, I was one among many, witnessing my nation torn asunder by a clash of worlds.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“Valoc, was a Malazan army here?’ ‘Army?’ Valoc smiled. ‘Delas Fana, I saw the enemy, there on the bank, watching as we charged. There were six of them.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“He imagined that this was what it meant to be lonely. An entire inner world with no way out, no audience or witnesses. If there was beauty in there, none could see it. If there was torment, no one could hear the cries for help.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing

“War isn’t just one thing, over and over again. It’s a thing that never stops changing, and every change is just fucking worse than what went before.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness

“Nature,’ intoned Daint, ‘always finds a balance. Why disrupt such a delicate situation?’ ‘I’ve seen horses run away when you look at them sidelong, Daint.”
― Steven Erikson, The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness