Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

You have to be afraid for it to count as bravery.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

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.

We are the total of our longings.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

We must be what we are, or we become our enemies.

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

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

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.

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 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]

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