Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

He wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last. A creation that would mean that he--the mosaic worker Caius Crispus of Varena--had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.

One didn't stop to talk with creatures from one's nightmares.

There are so many stories, she thinks, and most of them end up lost.

Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul's journeying.

It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men.

He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?

It was Aileron who saw the light blaze in Arthur's face. The Warrior leaped from his horse down into the road and, at the top of his great voice, cried 'Cavall!' Bracing his legs, he opened wide his arms and was knocked flying, nonetheless, by the wild leap of the dog. Over and over they rolled, the dog yelping in intoxicated delight, the Warrior mock growling in his chest. . . . This is' asked Aileron with gentle irony, 'your dog?

Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King's plans, we should meet Shalhassan's forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren't,' Diarmuid concluded, 'we blame anyone and everything except the plan.

We are always the person we were, and we grow into someone very different, if we live long enough. Both things are true.

Daylight was coming outside, but it was not only that: courage cast its own light.

It seemed to him that people must pass through each other's lives all the time, touch them, be touched by them. Leave something behind, maybe, like a star that fell – you became a memory.

Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls.

What we think we'll do is often not what we end up doing. It isn't always in our own control, our life.

And surely, surely, if we are not simply animals that live to fight, there must be a reason for bloodshed.

And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.

There is always grief. It is joy that is the rarest thing

The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time. I dream she is alive even now, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing. We can want things so much sometimes. It is the way we are.

It's one thing to make war for your country, your family, even in pursuit of glory. It's another to believe that the people you fight are embodiments of evil and must be destroyed for that. I want this peninsula back. I want Esperana great again, but I will not pretend that if we smash Al- Rassan and all it has built we are doing the will of any god I know.

Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived.

I know love," Says the littlest one. "Love is like a flower." "Why is love a flower? Little one tell me." "Love is a flower For the sweetness it gives Before it dies away.

We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love.

Perhaps in the darkest times all we can do is refuse to be part of the darkness.

Some writers later, describing the events of that night and day, wrote that Wan'yen of the Altai had seen a spirit-dragon of the river and become afraid. Writers do that sort of thing. They like dragons in their tales.