Malazan Quotes

A collection of the best words from the best fantasy series

[quotescurator]

See us flee, dreaming of lost peace, the age of purity and stasis, when we embraced decay like a lover and our love kept us blind and we were content. So long as we stayed entertained, we were content.

— Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8)

[malazanquotes]

A child starved never grows tall or strong. A child unloved can never find love or give it when grown. A child that does not laugh will become someone who can find nothing in the world to laugh at. And a child hurt deeply enough will spend a lifetime trying to scab that wound -- even as they ceaselessly pick at it.

Sinter, Dust of Dreams pg. 808

[malazanquotes]

Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that -- events beyond the will of gods -- and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.

Badalle reflects on religion, Dust of Dreams pg. 563

[malazanquotes]

"So the officers, they're like, parents?" "Depends" "On what?" "Well, if your parents were demented, deluded, corrupt, useless or sadistic, or any combination of those, then yes, officers are just like them"

Kisswhere explaining how to consider Bonehunters' officials to a new recruit, Dust of Dreams pg 311

[malazanquotes]

You don't fight wars! You don't fight battles! You just all form up and make new cemeteries!

Cuttle to Letherii soldiers, Dust of Dreams pg 154

[malazanquotes]

Generally speaking, people useless at everything else become academics.

Bugg, Dust of Dreams pg 28

[malazanquotes]

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief.

Toll the Hounds pg. 963

[malazanquotes]

If we are to live, we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fail - we will know that we have lived.

Anomander Rake, pg 958 Toll the Hounds

[malazanquotes]

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications, as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Scillara on sadness, Toll the Hounds pg. 684-685

[malazanquotes]

Iskaral Pust's love was pure and perfect, except that his wife kept getting in the way

Toll The Hounds, pg 463

[malazanquotes]

I was never good at inferring what is implied. Unless it's implicitly inferred.

Torvald Nom, Toll The Hounds pg. 336

[smokingchagga]

Rage and tell me then Not every tale is a gift When anguish gives the knife One more twist And blood is thinned by tears Cry out the injustice Not every tale is a gift In a world harsh with strife Leaving us bereft Deeds paling through the years And I will meet your eye Neither flinching nor shy As I fold death inside life And face you down With a host of mortal fears And I will say then Every tale is a gift And the scars borne by us both Are easily missed In the distance between us Bard’s Curse Fisher kel Tath (Toll the Hounds by Steven Erikson)

[malazanquotes]

Sweetest Sufferance, who had been so named by a mother either resigned to the rigours of motherhood or, conversely, poisoned by irony, blinked rapidly as she was wont to do when returning to reality.

Toll The Hounds, pg 304

[lonelywarder]

Despair, always demands a direction, a focus. Find the direction and the despair goes away.

Gardens of the Moon / Steven Erickson

[malazanquotes]

Most marriages involve mutual thoughts of murder on occasion

Scillara, Toll The Hounds, pg 136

[malazanquotes]

We suffer with the memory of how it was before suffering came, and this deepens the wound, this tears open the pain.

Reaper's Gale, pg. 779

[malazanquotes]

The only worthwhile historians are those who conclude their lives in succint acts of suicide

Collected Suicide Notes by historian Brevos, Reaper's Gale, pg 569