Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.

You can do impulsive, reckless things completely sober. Or, well, I could, when I was young.

It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck... Luck was always part of it, one way or another

Is there sorcery involved when you love me here, or when we first meet in a public place?

He sang one whole verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision inward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at all as he sang to Eanna herself, a hymn to names and the naming of things.

We are the total of our longings [...]

I... would not expect that freedom could be found or won without a price paid.

We Cyngael live where the farthest light of Jad falls. The last light of the sun. It needs attending to, my lord, lest it fail.

Memories, she thought, were tangling things. They brought you ease and they brought you sorrow, and the same images and people could do both.

Heimthra' was the word used for longing: for home, for the past, for things to be as they once had been. Even the gods were said to know that yearning, from when the worlds were broken.

Could one forget how to be free?

Here the world is all the world may be

The land is never truly dead. It can always come back. Or what is the meaning of the cycle of seasons and years?" She wiped her tears away and looked at him. His expression in the darkness was much too sad for a moment such as this. She wished she knew a way to dispel that sorrow, and not only for tonight. He said, "That is mostly true, I suppose. Or true for the largest things. Smaller things can die. People, dreams, a home.

We have a need to persuade ourselves we are not at the mercy of the world.

My third glass of a night is blue, Alessan said. The third glass I drink is always of blue wine. In memory of something lost. Lest on any single night I forget what it is I am alive to do.

And so saw, by a trick, an angle, a flaring of torchlight far down the dark river, how the arrow—white-feathered, she would remember, white as innocence, as winter in midsummer, as death—fell from the summit of its long, high arc to take the coran in the shoulder, driving him, slack and helpless, from the rope into the river amid laughter turned to screaming in the night.

The problem was, it was as easy to be killed on a foolish quest in the company of fools as on an adventure of merit beside men one respected and trusted.

It was good to feel laughter, to release it. To believe it was permitted. That many things might now, finally, be allowed. We are vulnerable when we feel that way. But not, in truth, any more than when we live curtailed, held back, enraged, afraid. Everything is, indeed, always changing. And not usually to be controlled by us, the children of earth and sky, with fortune's wheel always turning and a future we cannot know. •

The effect of being violently driven from home, and that home being despoiled .... it can go on and on like sea-surf against rocks. On and on within a man or a woman, or within a child as it grows up somewhere else, never sat home, only away .

There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.

If this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.

It is no peace of mine

You'd never killed anyone. Then you had.

A coragem residia em lutar para tentar ultrapassar esse medo, em erguer-se para fazer o que tinha de ser feito.