“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]”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“He wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last. A creation that would mean that he--the mosaic worker Caius Crispus of Varena--had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiently so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67]”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“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, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“But what did one own if life, if love, could be taken away to darkness? Was it all not just ... a loan, a leasehold, transitory as candles?”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“Small things change a life. Change lives.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“In all the lands ruled by that City, with its domes and its bronze and golden doors, its palaces and gardens and statues, forums and theatres and colonnades, bathhouses and shops and guildhalls, taverns and whorehouses and sanctuaries and the great Hippodrome, its triple landward walls that had never yet been breached, and its deep, sheltered harbour and the guarded and guarding seas, there was a timeworn phrase that had the same meaning in every tongue and every dialect.
To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune – or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something to vast for his capacity.
Valerius the Trakesian had become an Emperor.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
“heresies are not like clothing styles or beards, my lord, to go in and out of fashion by the season or the year.” Alixana”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
Guy Gavriel Kay
Born place: in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada
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“As it happened, the first three major advances in my life—and I will list all the advances here—
1. shoe-tying
2. pulling up on Xs
3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying
4. brushing tongue as well as teeth
5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed
6. discovering that sweeping was fun
7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make billpaying more efficient
8. deciding that brain cells ought to die
—have to do with shoe-tying, but I don't think that this fact is very unusual.”
― Nicholson Baker, quote from The Mezzanine
“No funny business. I’ll scream and dead or not it will hurt your ears”
― Penelope Fletcher, quote from Demon Girl
“There's something about outward appearances that has always been important to me. I always thought I was so ugly. I mean, I really did. I remember... as a little kid and just staring into the mirror for hours. It was like, if I looked long enough, maybe I'd finally be handsome. It never worked. I just got uglier and uglier. Nothing about me ever seemed good enough. And there was this sadness inside me - this hopelessness. Focusing on my physical appearance was at least easier than trying to address the internal shit. I could control the external - at least, to a point. I could buy different clothes, or cut my hair, or whatever. The pit opening up inside me was too frightening to even look at.”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines
“I wondered whether mad people would be better off if their memories could be neatened up, or taken off the shelves on which they were stored and replaced with nicer ones, and if they'd be the same person then, or completely different ones, and whether dreams were like a vandal rampaging through a library of memories, tearing out random pages and turning them into paper boats...”
― quote from The FitzOsbornes in Exile
“I looked at my sister's white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda's eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her - surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought - and dip my fingers in”
― Tiffany Baker, quote from The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Acheron
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Dead to the World
Silence
Demian. Die Geschich...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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