Guy Gavriel Kay famous 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.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Brother #Book #School

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

#Destiny #Journey #Hiking

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

#Book #Writing #Trying

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

#Play #Space #Peril

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

#Morning #Grateful #Writing

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

#Years #Europe #Temples

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

#Real #Knowing #Tree

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#People #Interesting #Novel

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

#Longing

Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Soul

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

#Falling In Love #Fall #Sadness

We must be what we are, or we become our enemies.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Enemy

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

#Mean

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

#Past #Journey #Focus

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

#Impact #Self #Way

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

#Night #Dragons #Rivers

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

#Heart #Lazy #Trying

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

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

#Nightmare #Creatures

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I dont think theres 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

#Growing Up #Real #Eye

A hand fought best when it made a fist.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Hands #Fists #Made

What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Running #Fate #Lines

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

#Player #Chinese #World

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

#Book #Writing #Fiction

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

#May #Boat

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

#Dark #Light #Names

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

#Lying #Reality #Understanding

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

#Heart #Owners

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

#Heart #Wish

Ice is for death and endings.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Ice

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

#Letting Go #Falling In Love #Sadness

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

#Poison #World #Cups

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

#Children #Knowing #Soul

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

#Moon #Men #Sun

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

#Children #Blessed #Men

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

#Thinking #Compassion #Needs

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

#Running #Stories #Way

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.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Pain #Phones #Fierce

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

#Children #Orbit #Would Be

I will not say I am sorry, but I can tell you that I grieve.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay

#Sorry #Grieving #I Am Sorry

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

#Islands #World #Another World

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.
-- 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

#Bridges #Shapes #Longing

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

#Heart #Law #Truth Is

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

#Despair #Matter #Gates

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

#Sometimes #Conclusion

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

#Kings #Woods #Blame