Randall Roberts

“We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned. T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the word. It must be given freely. In abundance.”
― Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice

“Or have you ever known someone for a long time, and fallen into a bad pattern with them so that you’re always quarrelling? So that no matter how good your intentions are, no matter that you’ve prayed to do better, when you start to talk to them you hear everything they say as malicious, and they do the same with you, so you can’t even say good morning without them saying sarcastically that it might be good for some people?”
― Jo Walton, Lent

“The lesson of history is that no one learns. Children were dying. He’d crouched, one hand on a mother’s shoulder, and watched with her as life ebbed from the baby in her arms. Like the light of an oil lamp, dimming, dimming, winking out. The moment when the struggle’s already lost, surrendered, and the tiny heart slows in its own realization, then stops in mute wonder. And never stirs again. It was then that pain filled the vast caverns within the living, destroying all it touched with its rage at inequity.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“It clearly hasn’t occurred to either of you that maybe Fiddler wants it that way. Wants to be called Strings, now, because his old life is gone, and with the old name comes bad memories, and he’s had enough of those.”
― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters