Guy Gavriel Kay
22 quotes
Biography
"There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk."
"We worship…the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176]"
"When power is gone the memory of power lingers."
"I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear."
"Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind."
"A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked."
"“The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.” He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. “Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.”"
"Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea."
"He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old."
"Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm."
"It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth."
"Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross."
"In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone."
"But knowledge, however you got it, changed things, Ned Marriner thought. You couldn’t go back to not knowing, even if you wanted to."
"We’ll fall off that bridge when we cross it."
"His choice here, no one else to blame. Sometimes, he thought, life was easier when you had people to stop you. Maybe that was something parents were good for."
"My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned."
"Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction.”{Guy Gavriel Kay}"
"That felt strange. How sharp a rent a handful of moments made in the fabric of a life."
"No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be."
"It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us."
"We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that."