“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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“I’m surprised you don’t have any tattoos. I thought that was part of the artist uniform.”
“Who says I should be that much of a cliché? I’m naturally a masterpiece.”
― Renee Ericson, quote from More Than Water
“For the first time, she felt proud to lay claim to her gender. Perhaps men had life easier. But they would never know this. They would never walk the shadow lands of pain and death to be part of the miracle of life.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from Mistaken Kiss
“I’m “exceptional”- a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of “gifted” and “deprived” (which used to mean “bright” and “retarded”) and as soon as “exceptional” begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. “Exceptional” refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon
“Riyadh was the base of the government, but none of the Al Sa’ud family particularly enjoyed the city; their complaints never ended about the dreariness of life in Riyadh. It was too hot and dry, the men of religion took themselves too seriously, the nights were too cold. Most of the family preferred Jeddah or Taif.”
― Jean Sasson, quote from The Complete Princess Trilogy: Princess; Princess Sultana's Daughters; and Princess Sultana's Circle
“Halbuki komünist değildi Selim.
Düşünmemişti komünizmin ne olduğunu bile.
O sadece on sekiz yaşındaydı
ve yirmi beş kuruş yerine elli kuruş istiyordu
ve on dört saat yerine on saat.
Polis bu kanaatta değildi fakat.
Yatırdılar Selim'i yere.
Selim kalktığı zaman
basamıyordu döşemelere.
Yatırdılar Selim'i yere,
Selim kalktığı zaman
göremiyordu önünü artık.
Yatırdılar Selim'i yere,
Selim kalktı ve yığıldı.
Selim'in koltuklarına girip
karanlık bir odaya götürdüler.
Ve duvarda bir çiviye bağladılar saçlarından,
o suretle ki
döşemeye ancak ayak parmaklarının ucu dokunuyordu.
Bir tramvay geçti sokaktan gıcırtılarla.
Yakın bir yerde yatsı ezanı okunuyordu.
Çözdüler Selim'i çividen,
yatırdılar Selim'i yere.
Ve Selim kalktığı zaman
bir pencere gördü uzaktan
çok uzaktan ama
perdesiz karanlık bir pencere.
Atıldı ona doğru.
Camlar kırıldı şangırdayarak.
İlk önce kayboldu bir insan başı
sonra kayboldu iki ayak.”
― Nâzım Hikmet Ran, quote from Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse
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