The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
Steven EriksonOne day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.
Steven EriksonWhat matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?
Steven EriksonSurvivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.
Steven EriksonA civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Gotho's Folly. Gotho's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.
Steven Erikson