Top 150 Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

102. “It is a sharp, cold life though, my darling. For a woman, for a man, without a hearth at the end of day for warmth. Without love to carry you outward and home.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

103. “If this was the world as the god-or gods-had made it, then mortal man, this mortal man, could acknowledge that and honour the power and infinite majesty that lay within it, but he would not say it was right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown from and autumn tree, helpless in the wind.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

104. “What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

105. “Shelter can be hard to find. A place can become our home for reasons we do not understand. We build the memories that turn into what we are, then what we were, as we look back.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

106. “They were like a bright golden coin, those two, two sides, different images on each, one value.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

107. “It was interesting, I suppose it still is, how vicious men can take power and be accepted, supported by those they govern, if they bring with them a measure of peace. If granaries are full and citizens fed.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

108. “He had a sense, through that spring, that his life would be so much better for her presence. He wasn’t wrong, but it was equally a truth that the purpose and direction of her life was not to make his better, and in time he even came to understand that.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

109. “Praise be to the Weaver and all the gods!′ said Shalhassan of Cathal. ‘Finally she’s done something adult!”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

110. “Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

111. “Here the world is all the world may be.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

112. “Gardens were an island of order imposed upon the chaos of the world.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

113. “You should have killed me by the river.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

114. “What I was born to may not be taken from me.′ She hesitates. ‘It may only be added to.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

115. “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

116. “The devout say we must trust in Jad. I have come to believe life is easier for them. Reversals are more easily dealt with when there is faith.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

117. “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

118. “The problem was, it was as easy to be killed on a foolish quest in the company of fools as on an adventure of merit beside men one respected and trusted.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

119. “I am afraid to try for more light lest it mean more dark.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

120. “But when did the young people become clever? Isn’t that supposed to take time?” Guidanio doesn’t smile. “Wisdom does,” he says. “People can be clever at any age.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

121. “The lesson of her days, Dianora thought, was simply this: that love was not enough. Whatever the songs of the troubadours might say. Whatever hope it might seem to offer, love was simply not enough to bridge the chasm in her world.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

122. “The inner voice always had the hard questions.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

123. “Brightly woven, Diar,′ Aileron said. And then dazzled them all with the warmth of his smile.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

124. “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

125. “Alluding and attacking, summoning a courage, embodying a gallantry of defiance that hurt to see, it was so noble and so doomed.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

126. “The military preferred – invariably – those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

127. “I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

128. “It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

129. “It does not end. A story finishes-or does for some, not for others-and there are other tales, intersecting, parallel, or sharing nothing but the time. There is always something more.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

130. “Whichever way the wind blows, it will rain upon the Kindath.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

131. “Perhaps in the darkest times all we can do is refuse to be part of the darkness.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

132. “The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn’t have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

133. “You can do impulsive, reckless things completely sober. Or, well, I could, when I was young.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

134. “I think,′ said Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, very slowly, ‘that I should know you in a pitch black room. I think I would know you anywhere near me in the world.’ He paused. ‘Is that answer enough, Jehane? Or too much of one? Will you say?”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

135. “He was also aware that memory could mislead you, or be lost. He vividly remembered the day he was married, for example, but everything blurred in and around the time his wife had died, and that was much, much later.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

136. “The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

137. “Screams of pain, cries of rage and fury cut the green night like blades of sound.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

138. “Rivers do usually begin in almost imperceptible ways. The great events and changes of the world under heaven also frequently start that way, their origins recognized only by those troubling themselves to look back.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

139. “We have a need to persuade ourselves we are not at the mercy of the world.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

140. “The truer measure of power, Brandin had once said to her, wouldn’t be found in having twenty heralds deafen a room by proclaiming one’s arrival. Any fool in funds for a day could rivet attention that way. The more testing course, the truer measure, was to enter unobtrusively and observe what happened.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

141. “There was a familiar, hard bitterness in him now, and a curiosity he could not deny, and a third thing, like the quickening hammer of a pulse, beneath both of these.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

142. “And so saw, by a trick, an angle, a flaring of torchlight far down the dark river, how the arrow – white-feathered, she would remember, white as innocence, as winter in midsummer, as death – fell from the summit of its long, high arc to take the coran in the shoulder, driving him, slack and helpless, from the rope into the river amid laughter turned to screaming in the night.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

143. “It is no peace of mine.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

144. “My third glass of a night is blue, Alessan said. The third glass I drink is always of blue wine. In memory of something lost. Lest on any single night I forget what it is I am alive to do.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

145. “If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place – acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garin had slowly become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative youngest child, whose own gifts, whatever they might turn out to be, were not those of the land.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

146. “Forgetting is part of our lives, my lord. Sometimes it is a blessing, or we could never move beyond loss.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

147. “Perhaps as often as we dream of things we wish might come to be, we dream of what we wish had been otherwise. We are carried forward through time, but our minds take us back.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

148. “Is there sorcery involved when you love me here, or when we first meet in a public place?”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

149. “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

150. “It’s just so strange,” she explained. “I can’t even grasp what it must mean.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay