'Gather a host of words, a host of words. Gather a host of words. Make them, make them, make them what? Physical, yes, make them physical, from the empty ether to the incision in clay, the stain on stone, the ink on skin. Physical, because the physical created – by its very nature before the eye (or the inner eye) – created and created patterns. And they could be played with played with played with. In numbers and sigils, in astral proportions. They could be coded inside codes inside codes until something is rendered, something both beautiful and absolute. Beautiful in its absoluteness. In its absolution, in its absolved essence, a thing of beauty. Understand, won’t you, the truth of patterns, how pattern finds truth in the tension of juxtaposition, in the game of meaning meaning the game which is the perfect pattern of language in the guise of imperfection – but what value any of this any of this any of this? The value is the body of text (hah, the body – the bodies) that in its absoluteness becomes sacred, and in sacredness becomes all that it portrays in its convivial ordering of the essentially meaningless. Patterns where none existed before. Creation from nothing. Awakening from absence of self. And what is the word the beautiful word the precious word and the perfect word that starts the game starts everything everything everything? Why, the word is birth. Bodies of text, all these bodies, all this flesh and the ink and the words and the words oh the words. Bodies and bodies, patterns inside patterns, lives and lives and lives all dreaming…all dreaming one dream. One dream. One dream one dream one one one dream. One. A dream of justice."-
-Toll the Hounds, Steven Erikson, Malazan Book of the Fallen.
(This particular passage is narrated by a wizard who is blind, insane, and dead. Not that that ever stops anyone in the Malazan universe.)
