Malazan Quotes

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.

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.

"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"

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

Generally speaking, people useless at everything else become academics.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Most marriages involve mutual thoughts of murder on occasion

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

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