Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

We see only glimpses of history, even our own. It is not entirely ours--in memory, in writing it down, in hearing or in reading it. We can reclaim only part of the past. Sometimes it is enough....

His intelligence stretched her to the limits, and then changed what those limits were.

She lifted her hands and closed them around his head... and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that newborn trialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.

Winter was coming.

It is an old truth that men and women sometimes miss what they hate as much as what they love.

This was not a beauty that warmed one. It cut, like a weapon. There was no nuance of gentleness in her, no shading of care, but fair she was, as is the flight of an arrow before it kills.

She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.

All the roads are dark. Only at the end is there a hope of light.

I am afraid to try for more light lest it mean more dark.

And Shalhassan of Cathal realized in that moment, standing between the fair brother and the dark, that he was not going to lead this war after all.

Brightly woven, Diar,' Aileron said. And then dazzled them all with the warmth of his smile.

Some paths, some doorways, some people were not to be yours, though the slightest difference in the rippling of time might have made it so.

You touched people's lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever.

Catriana sighed. "I'm hard to make friends with," she said at length. "I doubt it's worth your effort.

He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna's lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

A hand fought best when it made a fist.

She had come to accept, deeply, and with certitude, that she had been born into a world, a life, that would not let her be whole.

What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?

I have been made to realize tonight that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause.

It was interesting, I suppose it still is, how vicious men can take power and be accepted, supported by those they govern, if they bring with them a measure of peace. If granaries are full and citizens fed.

But when did the young people become clever? Isn't that supposed to take time?" Guidanio doesn't smile. "Wisdom does," he says. "People can be clever at any age.

Lazy poets try to elicit a reader's response with words designed to tug at the heart.

I think that when we're young we often have the sense that what we do when faced with a choice will define our lives forever. This can be untrue, sometimes amusingly so, but not always.

The soul must bend to endure.