Top 150 Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

2. “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

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

4. “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

5. “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

6. “Some paths, some doorways, some people were not to be yours, though the slightest difference in the rippling of time might have made it so.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

7. “You have to be afraid for it to count as bravery.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

8. “You do not honour them by living as if you, too, have died.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

10. “We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die. We stand up, as best we can under that. We move forward as best we can, hoping for light, kindness, mercy, for ourselves and those we love.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

11. “Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

12. “The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time. I dream she is alive even now, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing. We can want things so much sometimes. It is the way we are.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

13. “Ice is for death and endings.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

14. “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

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

16. “We Cyngael live where the farthest light of Jad falls. The last light of the sun. It needs attending to, my lord, lest it fail.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

17. “It’s one thing to make war for your country, your family, even in pursuit of glory. It’s another to believe that the people you fight are embodiments of evil and must be destroyed for that. I want this peninsula back. I want Esperana great again, but I will not pretend that if we smash Al- Rassan and all it has built we are doing the will of any god I know.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

19. “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.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

22. “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

23. “Do you know the wish of your heart?” – The Darkest Road.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

24. “We are the total of our longings.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

25. “Catriana sighed. “I’m hard to make friends with,” she said at length. “I doubt it’s worth your effort.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

26. “We are children of earth and sky.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

27. “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.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

28. “One didn’t stop to talk with creatures from one’s nightmares.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

29. “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

30. “What broke her in the end was to see that Dari, moving quietly in the snow, was tracing his flower neatly with a thin branch in the growing dark while tears were pouring down his face without surcease.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

31. “We see only glimpses of history, even our own. It is not entirely ours – in memory, in writing it down, in hearing or in reading it. We can reclaim only part of the past. Sometimes it is enough...”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

32. “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

33. “He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

34. “Another journey lay ahead, home at the end of it.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

35. “He waited for his cup to be filled, then added softly, “We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects that folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

36. “We should have met in Finavir.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

40. “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

41. “A hand fought best when it made a fist.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

42. “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

43. “Battles are won en route, Shalhassan of Cathal though. A worthy thought: he raised his hand in a certain way, and a moment later Razeil galloped up, uneasy on a horse at speed, and the Supreme Lord of Cathal made him write it down.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

44. “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

45. “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

46. “I think that when we’re young we often have the sense that what we do when faced with a choice will define our lives forever. This can be untrue, sometimes amusingly so, but not always.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

48. “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

49. “Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

50. “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