Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

We will leave a name.

We aren't heroes if we lead men into battles we will lose.

Her mother used to call her erimitsu, "clever one" in their own dialect... Kasia had a reputation already that made her almost unmarriageable at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft figures -- promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily birthed.

How can we ever presume to know what will come of our choices, our paths, the lives we lead?

Tell me, when your wife died...how did you go on living?" He opened his mouth and closed it without answering. She turned away. They went back through the forest to the sea. On the stony strand of the isle, he was still unable to speak. He watched as she unclipped and let fall her purple cloak, and then dropped the brooch that has pinned it and turned and went away along the white stones. The man named Mariscus followed her out of sight. How did you go on living?

It is in the nature of things that when we judge actions to be memorably courageous, they are invariably those that have an impact that resonates: saving other lives at great risk, winning a battle, losing one's life in a valiant attempt to do one or the other. A death of that sort can lead to songs and memories at least as much—sometimes more—than a triumph. We celebrate our losses, knowing how they are woven into the gift of our being here. Sometimes

And knowing, too, that this sort of artistry could not endure past the shaping moment, could only be spoken of after by those who recalled, or misrecalled, who had seen and half seen and not seen at all, distorted by memory and desire and ignorance, the achievement of it written as if on water or on sand. It mattered, terribly, and just now it didn't matter at all. Or could the fragility, the defining impermanence actually intensify the glory? The thing lost as soon as made?

Arthur had his hands in the scarred fur of the dog's ruff. They looked at each other, man and dog; Paul found that he could not watch. Looking away, he heard Arthur say, "Farewell, my gallant joy. You would go with me, I know, but it may not be. You will be needed yet, great heart. There…may yet come a time when we need not part.

You would not have believed," he said. "You would always have doubted. We needed to grow older, you and I, for me to say this and you to hear it.

False. I will always be a Savaric, my lord. Do not deceive yourself. What I was born to may not be taken from me.' She hesitates. 'It may only be added to.

Men changed during wars or conflict, sometimes beyond recognition. Tai

He turned to the king of Valledo. "Make your country—all of Esperaña if you can unite it—into a land that understands more than only war and righteous piety. Allow space in your lives for more than battle chants to inspire soldiers. Teach your people to . . . understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music.

Everything had already changed though, and both men knew it. The city they had built together—a smaller, quieter repository of some of the same graces Silvenes had embodied under the khalifs—was already finished, its brief flowering done. However this invasion ended, King Badir's city of music and ivory was lost.

The two men were still in the habit of taking this last glass together; the depth and endurance of friendship marked as much in their silence as in the words.

Watching, letting the growth of wisdom guide him into silence

Maybe it is the art that will outlive us all.

He found himself taking note of the trappings of this, the king's most private room. [...] the etched windows over the garden, the gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall, the intricately woven carpets . . . In a way, Mazur ben Avren thought, all these delicate things were bulwarks, the innermost defenses of civilized man against the rain and dark, and ignorance.

I haven't always found that it is our intentions, the decisions we make, that shape and guide our lives. The opposite, just as often, it seems to me. Impulse creates our stories, or chance, the entirely unforeseen. And what we remember of our own past can be unpredictable. I didn't learn this at school in Avegna, but I think Guarino would have agreed.

Ammar's eyes opened without warning, vivid and blue, the same color as her own. He looked at her. She watched him settle into an awareness of the day, what morning it was.

malgré tout leur fameux cynisme (ou peut-être à cause de lui), les Sarantins étaient presque toujours d'une nature émotive et passionnée, comme si vivre au centre du monde donnait du relief et de l'importance à chaque événement de leur existence.

The savagery that was consuming Esperaña and Al-Rassan, tearing the peninsula apart the way wild beasts shred a carcass.

Not every man or woman sailing down the river will be a figure of force or significance. Some are merely in the boat with all of us.

younger son of a merchant? What was his life about? Trade? Clever, profitable dealings? He was from a city-state that flourished by letting no one hate them enough to do anything disagreeable. Where you are situated in the world

Change and chance are the way of the world.