Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes & Sayings

The great events of an age appear, to those living through them, as backdrops only to the vastly more compelling dramas of their own lives, and how could it be otherwise?
In this same way, many of the men and women there in the Hippodrome (and some who were not, but later claimed to have been) would cling to one private image or another of what transpired. They might be entirely different things, varying moments, for each of us has strings within the soul, and we are played upon in different ways, like instruments, and how could it be otherwise? — Guy Gavriel Kay

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared. — Guy Gavriel Kay

And surely, surely, if we are not simply animals that live to fight, there must be a reason for bloodshed. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

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

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful. — Guy Gavriel Kay

And in the dark of that room, notorious for the woven patterns of desire it had seen, Ammar ibn Khairan held the woman beloved of the man he'd killed, and offered what small comfort he could. He granted her the courtesy and space of his silence, as she finally permitted herself to weep, mourning the depth of her loss, the appalling disappearance, in an instant, of love in a bitter world. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

I'm happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain. He's a Spanish national hero. I'd rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively. — Guy Gavriel Kay

You have to be afraid for it to count as bravery. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Men changed during wars or conflict, sometimes beyond recognition. Tai — Guy Gavriel Kay

When you didn't say a lot, he thought, you said the important things. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes. — Guy Gavriel Kay

He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.
'Tigana!' he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: 'Tigana!' And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.
'TIGANA!'
Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these
a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves ... that never goes away. — Guy Gavriel Kay

You touched people's lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories. — Guy Gavriel Kay

most hated by the dark, for their name is light. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form ... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail. — Guy Gavriel Kay

When I am reading for research and making notes, I use a cleverly designed curved lap-desk, and I sit up dutifully, mindful of ergonomics and suchlike concepts. When reading for pleasure, I take advantage of the 'recline' in recliner. — 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

Small things change a life. Change lives. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme. — Guy Gavriel Kay

All the roads are dark. Only at the end is there a hope of light. — Guy Gavriel Kay

We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love. — Guy Gavriel Kay

In summer darkness, stars in her south-facing window, she makes - or accepts - a decision in her heart. There is fear again with it, and sorrow, but also a kind of easing of disquiet and distress, which is what acceptance is said to bring, is it not? — Guy Gavriel Kay

Just now, high above the chaos of Sarantium, it seemed as if there were so many things he wanted to honour or exalt- or take to task, if it came to that, for there was no need for, no justice in, children dying of plague, or young girls being cut into pieces in the forest, or sold in grief for winter grain.
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 that it was right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown from an autumn tree, helpless in the wind.
He might be, all men and women might be as helpless as that leaf, but he would not admit it, and he would do something here on the dome that said- or aspired to say- these things, and more. — Guy Gavriel Kay

But what did one own if life, if love, could be taken away to darkness? Was it all not just ... a loan, a leasehold, transitory as candles? — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

I am afraid to try for more light lest it mean more dark. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Do you know the wish of your heart? - The Darkest Road — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

Here the world is all the world may be — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred. — Guy Gavriel Kay

You're too clever to be a soldier." Then she shook her head. "Don't say it. I know. We need our soldiers to be clever. I do know."
"Thank you," he murmured. "You can do all of the conversation. Make it easier for me. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace ... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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] — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

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

Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.
You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

We are not gods. We make mistakes. We do not live very long.
Sometimes someone grinds ink, mixes it with water, arranges paper, takes up a brush to record our time, our days, and we are given another life in those words. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world. — Guy Gavriel Kay

We are the total of our longings. — Guy Gavriel Kay

In general, the main themes emerge early for each book, even before the storyline and characters, as I research the time and place I want to draw upon. Having said that, every single book so far has offered me surprises en route, and these include motifs that come forward as I am writing. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Only then, invisible to everyone and with her curtains drawn, did she allow her tears to fall: in love, and for his hurts, and in terrible pride. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them. — Guy Gavriel Kay

His intelligence stretched her to the limits, and then changed what those limits were. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us - what Talmudic scholars once called 'the unwanted gaze.' Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I've written often on the subject. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

You'd never killed anyone. Then you had. — Guy Gavriel Kay

We worship ... the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can't even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176] — Guy Gavriel Kay

Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction."

{Guy Gavriel Kay} — Guy Gavriel Kay

Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul's journeying. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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 — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

Sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war. — 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

Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

He was still on his feet, and before him was a man who stood in the path of...what? Of a great many things, his own dream of Gorhaut not least of all. Of what his home should be, in the eyes of the world, in the sight of Corannos, in his own soul. He had said this two nights ago, words very like this, King Daufridi of Valensa. He's been asked if he loved his country.
He did. He loved it with a heart that ached like an old man's fingers in rain, hurting for the Gorhaut of his own vision, a land worthy of the god who had chosen it, and of the honour of men. Not a place of scheming wiles, of a degraded, sensuously corrupt king, of people dispossessed of their lands by a cowardly treaty, or of ugly designs under the false, perverted aegis of Corannos for nothing less than annihilation here south of the mountains. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I had been obsessed with the Arthurian legends all my life, and I knew that that would work its way into any trilogy I wrote. I was fascinated by the Eddas, the Norse and Icelandic legends, Odin on the world tree. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Not every man or woman sailing down the river will be a figure of force or significance. Some are merely in the boat with all of us. — 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

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

Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiently so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking. — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

Will there ever be a time when it is not a curse to be born a woman? When we can do no more, than stand by and be extremely brave and watch them die? — Guy Gavriel Kay

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

Whichever way the wind blows, it
will rain upon the Kindath. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it. — Guy Gavriel Kay

He wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last. A creation that would mean that he
the mosaic worker Caius Crispus of Varena
had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Tigana, let my memory of
you be like a blade in my
soul. — 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