“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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“A slap wouldn’t have pulled me out of the trance any faster.”
― Chloe Neill, quote from Some Girls Bite
“I've learned that the more people embrace their disadvantages, the less disadvantaged they become!”
― Chris Colfer, quote from The Wishing Spell
“Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, 'I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,' and when Brad said, 'What starts to happen?' she said hysterically, 'People starting to come apart.”
― Shirley Jackson, quote from The Lottery and Other Stories
“But it made her smile, to see it, to see how the pen formed the shapes and the shapes told a story of a name.”
― Lois Lowry, quote from Gathering Blue
“Me gustas más en las noches, cuando estamos los dos en la misma almohada, bajo las sábanas, en la oscuridad”
― Juan Rulfo, quote from Pedro Páramo
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Why Men Don't Listen...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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