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Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes | Quotes said by Guy Gavriel Kay

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #1

    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.


  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #2

    A hand fought best when it made a fist.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #3

    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 Quote #4

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #5

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #6

    By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #7

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #8

    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.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the reader, not move it further away. It is more than an escape. When we read of the only daughter of a fisherman (or the third son of a woodcutter) in a fairy tale, we are all that character. That's the underlying pulse beat of such tales. Using the fantastic as a prism for the past, if done properly, removes the tale from distancing specificity. It can't just be read as unique to a time and place; it is universalized in interesting, powerful ways. When I wrote Tigana, about the way tyranny tries to erase identity in conquered peoples, the fantasy setting seems to have done exactly that: I'm asked in places ranging from Korea to Poland to Croatia to Quebec, Were you writing about us?

    I was. All of them. That is the point. The fantastic is a tool in the writer's arsenal, as potentially powerful as any there is, and any tool we have works to the benefit of the reader.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #14

    It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck... Luck was always part of it, one way or another

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #15

    It is not easy, she thinks, to make your way in the world while insisting on a new path.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #16

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    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.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #23

    The privacy of pride.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #26

    We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #29

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

  • Guy Gavriel Kay Quote #30

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

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