" 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 (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2)