Quotes from Guy Gavriel Kay

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

Praise be to the Weaver and all the gods!' said Shalhassan of Cathal. 'Finally she's done something adult!

People were ferociously poor. Farmers were abused everywhere, taxed mercilessly to keep the artisans and merchants in the cities happier with their lords—and so less dangerous.

No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.

It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck

We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.

What broke her in the end was to see that Dari, moving quietly in the snow, was tracing his flower neatly with a thin branch in the growing dark while tears were pouring down his face without surcease.

You had to grow into your own significance—or come to terms with the lack of it.

You do not honour them by living as if you, too, have died

It is a sharp, cold life though, my darling. For a woman, for a man, without a hearth at the end of day for warmth. Without love to carry you outward and home.

those around a dying person, sometimes loving that person, had their own needs, and these were also to be addressed if you were in the world to heal.

Legends, if you crossed their path, could get you killed.

We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.

The devout say we must trust in Jad. I have come to believe life is easier for them. Reversals are more easily dealt with when there is faith.

But when a place has been an island the memory of water lingers, and of water magic, no matter how far away the sea may be, or how long ago it fell away. And

Lancelot was following, slowly, on the dark and narrow path. All about him and from high above, the mighty trees of Pendaran Wood were letting fall their green leaves, gently, on a night in the midst of summer, to honour the passage of the man.

She was a river or the sea, he could end here.

There was a familiar, hard bitterness in him now, and a curiosity he could not deny, and a third thing, like the quickening hammer of a pulse, beneath both of these.

If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place—acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garin had slowly become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative youngest child, whose own gifts, whatever they might turn out to be, were not those of the land.

Screams of pain, cries of rage and fury cut the green night like blades of sound.

It had gone far enough, this passiveness, this acceptance, absorbing the designs of others - benign, or otherwise. It was not what he was, or would allow himself to be, under the nine heavens. Perhaps he could declare that, with two swords in his hands.

These two, the memories of last autumn, could be addressed later—if she chose. Right now, she had a task, and she could very much use whatever payment they ended up offering.

Forgetting is part of our lives, my lord. Sometimes it is a blessing, or we could never move beyond loss.

He waited for his cup to be filled, then added softly, "We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects that folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful.