Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

It was surprising how easy it was to think about the unthinkable if you'd had a few glasses of wine on a spring night.

I am trying to say that what has happened to you is a hard thing, even if there is war somewhere. Even if emperors and kings die. You are entitled to your rage.

C'était aussi un ambitieux, estima-t-elle, mais seulement à la façon des gens trop zélés qui craignent de voir dérangé l'ordre d'une vie bien établie. Aucun feu intérieur n'animait cet homme.

Will you do me harm?' Alun opened his eyes. She was a silver shining in the wood, beyond imagining. He saw the trees around them and the summer grass. 'Not for all the lights in all the worlds,' he said, and took her in his arms.

It was so strange to realize how it was only at this brink of the chasm, threshold of the dark or the god's holy light, that one could grasp and accept one's own heart's yearning for more of the world. For life.

As far as Kendra was concerned, defiance needed to get you somewhere, or it was just...being noisy.

What is my sin, Blaise? Rudel was like that. A knife in the voice and in the thought behind. Quicksilver bright, insubstantial as a moon on water sometimes, then sharp and merciless and deadly as ... as an arrow dipped in syvaren. And the sharpness in his perceptions, as much as in anything else. A man from whom it was difficult to hide. For the sin, the transgression, lay— and Rudel knew it, they both knew it — in his having given Blaise exactly what he wanted.

Another breeze, entering the room. Dawn wind. He would be going home soon. He would sit with her, and look out upon the sea. Morning was coming, the god's return. Almost time to rise and go to prayer. The bed was very soft. Almost time, but the darkness had not quite lifted, light still to come, he could linger a little with memory. It was necessary, it was allowed. End it with the ending of a night.

The customs officials never ask for gifts but they expect them. There is a fairly precise scale of how much to give at different levels. If you are too generous with someone lower down the ranks of bureaucrats it will often become known, and those higher up will be unhappy. Not only will they expect more themselves, they will be legitimately disturbed that someone is interfering with norms and protocols. It is not for reckless Jaddites to disturb an orderly system.

painted moth-eyebrows

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}

He'd stopped permitting himself to be unhappy about it.

I knew, once, a woman diamond bright, and two men I will not forget. I played a part in a story in a fierce, wild, windblown time. I do have that. I always will. I am here and it is mine, for as near to always as we are allowed.

Fear any and all of these things," Ra-Tenniel said. "The tearing of our threads from the Loom, the unsaying of our histories, the unraveling of the Weaver's design.

You can indeed die at the margins of a story, but you are as dead as if it were your own tale ending and never told.

Det finns mörker överallt just nu, svarade han. Vi kan inte undvika det, endast skingra det, och det blir inte lätt. I själva faran ligger kanhända vårt hopp om fri väg.

durent se faire expliquer la situation en un langage qu'ils pouvaient comprendre. Il était possible, bien sûr, de simplement leur donner des ordres sans rien expliquer, mais Shirvan régnait depuis longtemps et savait que la plupart des gens sont plus efficaces quand ils saisissent eux-mêmes de quoi il s'agit. Il

Le passé reste avec nous jusqu'à notre mort", avait écrit Protonias longtemps auparavant, "et nous devenons ensuite le souvenir d'autres personnes, jusqu'à ce qu'elles meurent à leur tour.

The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn't have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.

Lin Kuo himself would have said that his legacy was his daughter. Or no. He'd have believed that, but never voiced the thought, for fear of putting a burden of such weight upon her shoulders, which would be an improper thing to do to anyone, let alone a child so dearly loved from the beginning of her days to the end of his.

Even the birds above the lake Are singing of my love, And even the flowers along the shore Are growing for her sake.

With her words the moment passed, the world moved on again: time, the flowing river, the moons. And the delicate thing that had been in the air between them - whatever it might have been named - fell, as it seemed to Jehane, softly to rest in the grass by the water. 'Goodbye,' he said. 'Be always blessed, on all the paths of your life. My dear.' And then he said her name.

heresies are not like clothing styles or beards, my lord, to go in and out of fashion by the season or the year." Alixana

My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us - what Talmudic scholars once called 'the unwanted gaze.' Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I've written often on the subject.