Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

Guy Gavriel Kay
The military preferred - invariably - those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.

Guy Gavriel Kay
What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?

Guy Gavriel Kay
Why did becoming accustomed to something have to render its pleasures stale.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Weariness, sometimes more than anything else, can bring an end to war.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources.

Guy Gavriel Kay
It is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

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

Guy Gavriel Kay
We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.

Guy Gavriel Kay
A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done... something.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.

Guy Gavriel Kay
I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Home was a dream she'd had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.

Guy Gavriel Kay
The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes. He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.

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

Guy Gavriel Kay
Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Guy Gavriel Kay
She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

Guy Gavriel Kay
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Guy Gavriel Kay
One man sees a riselka: his life forks there. Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die. Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die. One woman sees a riselka: her path comes clear to her. Two women see a riselka: one of them shall bear a child. Three women see a riselka: one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.

Guy Gavriel Kay
There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

Guy Gavriel Kay
But if you couldn't do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

Guy Gavriel Kay
How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

Guy Gavriel Kay
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.

Guy Gavriel Kay
When I'm all grown up, come what may,
I'll build a boat to carry me away

Guy Gavriel Kay
A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.

Guy Gavriel Kay
It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.

Guy Gavriel Kay
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.

Guy Gavriel Kay
In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

Guy Gavriel Kay
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?

Guy Gavriel Kay