Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

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.

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

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

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]