Thursday, May 21, 2009

Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, Deadhouse Gates

"We stretch to meet each minor goal, there's a genius in this. Coltaine offers the marginally possible to fool us in achieving the impossible."
~Duiker, pg. 310

"Names to faces are like twinned serpents threatening the most painful bite of all. I'll never return to the List of the Fallen, because I see now that the unnamed soldier is a gift. The named soldier--dead, melted wax--demands a response among the living... A response no one can make. Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous--as if cursed--while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?"
~Duiker, pg. 353

"Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living."
~Duiker, pg. 353

"Show me a mortal who is not pursued, and I'll show you a corpse. Every hunter is hunted, every mind that knows itself has stalkers. We drive and are driven. The unknown pursues the ignorant, the truth assails every scholar wise enough to know his own ignorance, for that is the meaning of unknowable truths."
~Heboric, pg. 370

"We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And, indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again."
~Fiddler, pg. 558

"It's our nature, isn't it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief taht simple solutions exist."
~Kalam Mekhar, pg. 580

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