Best 66 quotes of Guy Gavriel Kay on MyQuotes

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

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.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

Do you know the wish of your heart?" - The Darkest Road

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

... everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

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

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

It was different, though, knowing something in your thoughts and then hearing it confirmed, made real, planted in the world like a tree

I will not say I am sorry, but I can tell you that I grieve.

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

Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.

Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources.

most hated by the dark, for their name is light.

My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

The heart has its own laws... and the truth is... the truth is that you are the law of mine.

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

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.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had.

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?

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

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 the total of our longings.

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

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

What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?

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

When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.

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

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

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

Ambitions and dreams put you at a drinking table with unexpected companions. Cups were filled and refilled, making you drunk with the illusion of changing the world.

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

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

Could one forget how to be free?

Eyyia?" said her husband, and Eliane bet Danel heard the mangling of her name as music. "You sound like a marsh frog," she said, moving to stand before his chair. By the flickering light she saw him smile. "Where have you been," she asked. "My dear. I've needed you so much." "Eyyia," he tried again, and stood up. His eyes were black hollows. They would always be hollows. 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.

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]

He had a vivid sense of roads forking, rivers branching, one of those moments where the life that follows cannot be as it might otherwise have been.

How can we ever presume to know what will come of our choices, our paths, the lives we lead?

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 is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.

Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world. Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. 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.