Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.

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

When power is gone the memory of power lingers.

"Sometimes the blind to do with the blind."
"Yeah," said Ned. "Straight over cliffs."

The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes." He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. "Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.

Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths.…
Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?

Sunrise, the first gift in the world. Promise and healing after the hard transit of night. After a darkness beset with beasts—imagined and real—and inner fears, and untamed, violent men. After sightlessness that could lead one astray into ditch or bog or over a cliff, or into the clutch and sway of whatever spirits might be a broad, bent on malice.
Morning’s pale light had offered an end to such fears for centuries, millennia, whatever dangers might come with the day. Shutters were banged open, curtains drawn, shop doors and windows were unlocked, city gates unbarred, swung wide, as men and women made their way out into the offered day.
On the other hand (in life there was almost always another hand), daylight meant that intimacy, privacy, escape from the unwanted gaze, silence for meditation, the solace of unseen tears on a pillow—or of secret love on that same pillow before, or after—were so much harder to claim. Rarer coinage, in the clear light.

I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.

We’ll fall off that bridge when we cross it.

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

Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.

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

“But why would they attack us? What have you been doing here, Ned?”
“Why would who attack us?”
“Wolves.”
“What? No way. Wolves are mostly vegetarian. I learned that in school last year.”
“Then tell these to go find the salad bar,” said Aunt Kim, grimly.

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.

His choice here, no one else to blame. Sometimes, he thought, life was easier when you had people to stop you. Maybe that was something parents were good for.