Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could remembered, it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever.

EVENTUALLY, MORNING CAME. Morning always comes. There are always losses in the night, a price paid for light.

You should have killed me by the river

For all his frustrations and his chronic sense of being overburdened. He was proud of that; he'd always felt that it was worth doing a task properly if it was worth doing at all. That was part of his problem, of course; that was why he ended up with so much to do. It was also the source of his own particular pride: he knew--and he was certain they knew that there was no one else who could handle details such as these as well as he.

Small things change a life. Change lives.

It was too bitter a truth even for irony.

We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.

We live among mysteries. Love is one, there are others. We must not imagine we understand all there is to know about the world.

It does not end. A story finishes-or does for some, not for others-and there are other tales, intersecting, parallel, or sharing nothing but the time. There is always something more.

Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening

I think,' said Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, very slowly, 'that I should know you in a pitch black room. I think I would know you anywhere near me in the world.' He paused. 'Is that answer enough, Jehane? Or too much of one? Will you say?

That felt strange. How sharp a rent a handful of moments made in the fabric of a life.

He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he'd contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]

I didn't ask to be made a princess." This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough. "Who chooses their fate?" It is the third one, the tallest. "Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?" "Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them?" she says, too quickly.

If this was the world as the god-or gods-had made it, then mortal man, this mortal man, could acknowledge that and honour the power and infinite majesty that lay within it, but he would not say it was right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown from and autumn tree, helpless in the wind.

And it is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

We should have met in Finavir.

But courage was not lacking in her heart, though it might be foolhardy and unwise.

He wasn't a poet, not everyone is.

He didn't think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.

Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.

If you so much as start to bow or anything like that, Dave, I'll beat you up. I swear I will.

The inner voice always had the hard questions.

She'd been afraid, preparing herself, after the summons came to the farmhouse—but fear was something you mastered, not a thing that defined you. Folco told all of them that, often. You didn't deny you felt it, you ruled