Guy Gavriel Kay

Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths.…

Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?

His choice here, no one else to blame. Sometimes, he thought, life was easier when you had people to stop you. Maybe that was something parents were good for.

We’ll fall off that bridge when we cross it.

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

But knowledge, however you got it, changed things, Ned Marriner thought. You couldn’t go back to not knowing, even if you wanted to.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.

Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.

He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.