Sean McCann

“It is an extraordinary act of courage,’ said Tulas Shorn, ‘to come to know a stranger’s pain. To even consider such a thing demands a profound dispensation, a willingness to wear someone else’s chains, to taste their suffering, to see with one’s own eyes the hue cast on all things – the terrible stain that is despair.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“What held real value in this world? In any world? Friendship, the gifts of love and compassion. The honour one accorded the life of another person. None of this could be bought with wealth. It seemed to him such a simple truth. Yet he knew that its very banality was fuel for sneering cynicism and mockery. Until such things were taken away, until the price of their loss came to be personal, in some terrible, devastating arrival into one’s life. Only at that moment of profound extremity did the contempt wash down from that truth, revealing it bare, undeniable.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.”
― Ken Liu, The Wall of Storms

“He had told himself that it was an act of courage to let her go, to give her the final decision. Courage and sacrifice. He no longer believed that. There was no sacrifice made in being abandoned. There was no courage in doing nothing.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds