“There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Ice is for death and endings.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“One man sees a riselka: his life forks there.
Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die.
Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.
One woman sees a riselka: her path comes clear to her.
Two women see a riselka: one of them shall bear a child.
Three women see a riselka: one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“The heart has its own laws... and the truth is... the truth is that you are the law of mine.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“When I'm all grown up, come what may,
I'll build a boat to carry me away”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“... everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul’s journeying.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Tigana, let my memory of
you be like a blade in my
soul.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.
'Tigana!' he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: 'Tigana!' And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.
'TIGANA!'
Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these-- a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“She lifted her hands and closed them around his head... and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that newborn trialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower. ”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Catriana sighed. "I'm hard to make friends with," she said at length. "I doubt it's worth your effort.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“His intelligence stretched her to the limits, and then changed what those limits were.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna’s lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“He sang one whole verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision inward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at all as he sang to Eanna herself, a hymn to names and the naming of things.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“[We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“We should have met in Finavir.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
“It was the doing, he learned quickly enough—in the first inn that refused to serve him his requested flask of Senzio green wine—of the pinch-buttocked, joy-killing priests of Eanna. The”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Tigana
Guy Gavriel Kay
Born place: in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada
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“Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Good Morning, Midnight
“One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Strength to Love
“Pope who announced his intention to transform the cultured silk-brocaded propriety of the Rome of Pope Benedict XVI into ‘a poor Church, for the poor’.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
― Jeffrey Archer, quote from Be Careful What You Wish For
“Poétise, poétise, fais-toi le grand cinéma de la liberté passée. Vrai que j'aimais ma vie, que je voyais l'avenir sans désespoir. Et je ne m'ennuyais pas. J'en ai réellement prononcé des propos désabusés sur le mariage, le soir dans ma chambre, avec les copines étudiantes, une connerie, la mort, rien qu'à voir la trombine des couples mariés au restau, ils bouffent l'un en face de l'autre sans parler, momifiés. Quand Hélène, licence de philo, concluait que c'était tout de même un mal nécessaire, pour avoir des enfants, je pensais qu'elle avait de drôles d'idées, des arguments saugrenus. Moi je n'imaginais jamais la maternité avec ou sans mariage. Je m'irritais aussi quand presque toutes se vantaient de savoir bien coudre, repasser sans faux plis, heureuses de ne pas être seulement intellectuelles, ma fierté devant une mousse au chocolat réussie avait disparu en même temps que Brigitte, la leur m'horripilait. Oui, je vivais de la même manière qu'un garçon de mon âge, étudiant qui se débrouille avec l'argent de l'État, l'aide modeste des parents, le baby-sitting et les enquêtes, va au cinéma, lit, danse, et bosse pour avoir ses examens, juge le mariage une idée bouffonne.”
― Annie Ernaux, quote from A Frozen Woman
As You Wish: Inconce...
Red Sparrow
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