“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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“النقطة المهمة ليست في وجوب أن يعرف الإنسان الله ويعبده، بل هي أنه يجب على الإنسان أن يختار بحرية تامة أن يعرف الله ويعبده.”
― Jeffrey Lang, quote from Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America
“Give me one year.Give me a year to prove to you that we belong together. That your darkness won't blot out my light. Promise me”
― Robin Bridges, quote from The Gathering Storm
“Unfortunately, you don't get to choose family, Sonny had told me once. But you do get to choose everyone else. In this case, I was cherry picking who I was going to spend the gift of my life with.”
― Mariana Zapata, quote from Under Locke
“- Do you want to know why I followed you into that funeral parlor?
- You said you followed me on a whim.
- That´s the truth, but there´s more to it. I was parking at the gas station across the street and I saw you get out of your car. I didn´t think much of it until you pausen on your way inside the shop. You tilted your head toward the sun and closed your eyes, like a prisoner stepping outside after years of being locked away. It seemed so odd. No one just stops and appreciates life like that, but you did. I could see your smile from across the street and I couldn´t look away. I knew in that moment that I was completely uninterested in pursuing a life in wich I didn´t cross that street and meet you.”
― R.S. Grey, quote from With This Heart
“After all, eyes are the windows to the soul. But Renzo had a bit too much soul in his eye.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hold
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HiddenBookQuoters 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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