Top 150 Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “All the roads are dark. Only at the end is there a hope of light.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

52. “We can never truly know the path we have not walked.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

53. “Heimthra’ was the word used for longing: for home, for the past, for things to be as they once had been. Even the gods were said to know that yearning, from when the worlds were broken.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

54. “He sang one whole verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision inward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at all as he sang to Eanna herself, a hymn to names and the naming of things.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

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

— Guy Gavriel Kay

56. “By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

57. “There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

58. “Weariness, sometimes more than anything else, can bring an end to war.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

59. “The world didn’t allow you clean, clear judgments very often, it seemed to Daiyan. He envied those who thought otherwise, who lived otherwise.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

60. “But if you couldn’t do everything, did that mean you did nothing?”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

61. “It had gone far enough, this passiveness, this acceptance, absorbing the designs of others – benign, or otherwise. It was not what he was, or would allow himself to be, under the nine heavens. Perhaps he could declare that, with two swords in his hands.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

62. “Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

63. “She lifted her hands and closed them around his head... and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that newborn trialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

64. “It was, Jelena though, another kind of arrogance to believe you could understand the way the world was made. It could not be done, there was too much. You needed to be open to it, though, to what your life gave you and demanded.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

65. “He had a vivid sense of roads forking, rivers branching, one of those moments where the life that follows cannot be as it might otherwise have been.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

66. “What we think we’ll do is often not what we end up doing. It isn’t always in our own control, our life.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

67. “Sometimes you didn’t really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

68. “People were ferociously poor. Farmers were abused everywhere, taxed mercilessly to keep the artisans and merchants in the cities happier with their lords – and so less dangerous.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

69. “What mortal knew the way their fate line would run?”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

70. “You’d never killed anyone. Then you had.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

71. “The soul must bend to endure.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

72. “He sometimes imagined them all, men and women, children, everyone in the world, sailing down the Sky River in the hugeness of the dark, surrounded by all the stars. Some tried to steer the ship. He had tried. But only the gods could do that, in the end.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

73. “Daylight was coming outside, but it was not only that: courage cast its own light.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

74. “But courage was not lacking in her heart, though it might be foolhardy and unwise.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

75. “An encounter on a springtime road. The random spinning of fortune’s wheel. It can sway us, change us, shape or end our days.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

76. “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

77. “Irritation for some men was their response to strain.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

78. “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

79. “She was a river or the sea, he could end here.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

80. “It is an old truth that men and women sometimes miss what they hate as much as what they love.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

81. “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

82. “Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

83. “Legends, if you crossed their path, could get you killed.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

84. “You had to grow into your own significance – or come to terms with the lack of it.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

85. “As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

86. “It was too bitter a truth even for irony.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

87. “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

88. “But when a place has been an island the memory of water lingers, and of water magic, no matter how far away the sea may be, or how long ago it fell away. And.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

89. “When you didn’t say a lot, he thought, you said the important things.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

90. “Could one forget how to be free?”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

91. “Memories, she thought, were tangling things. They brought you ease and they brought you sorrow, and the same images and people could do both.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

92. “His intelligence stretched her to the limits, and then changed what those limits were.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

93. “She’d been afraid, preparing herself, after the summons came to the farmhouse – but fear was something you mastered, not a thing that defined you. Folco told all of them that, often. You didn’t deny you felt it, you ruled.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

94. “You touched people’s lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

95. “Lazy poets try to elicit a reader’s response with words designed to tug at the heart.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

96. “Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could remembered, it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

97. “These two, the memories of last autumn, could be addressed later – if she chose. Right now, she had a task, and she could very much use whatever payment they ended up offering.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

98. “Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

99. “It seemed to him that people must pass through each other’s lives all the time, touch them, be touched by them. Leave something behind, maybe, like a star that fell – you became a memory.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

100. “We are always the person we were, and we grow into someone very different, if we live long enough. Both things are true.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay