K.S. > K.S.'s Quotes

“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, Sailing to Sarantium

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done . . . something.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
Walk mindfully, well-loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.”
― Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
― Neil Gaiman

“... It's perfect! Locke would appreciate it."

"Bug," Calo said, "Locke is our brother and our love for him knows no bounds. But the four most fatal words in the Therin language are 'Locke would appreciate it.'"

"Rivalled only by 'Locke taught me a new trick,'" added Galo.

"The only person who gets away with Locke Lamora games ..."

"... is Locke ..."

"... because we think the gods are saving him up for a really big death. Something with knives and hot irons ..."

"... and fifty thousand cheering spectators.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud

“What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“I still see his blood in my hands every time I close my eyes. It made me sick, sinking that knife. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, if he had a family, what he did for a living. I wanted to say I was sorry. I was doing this for my family, too. Someday when you get older you might ask me if there were other options, and why I didn’t take them. And I’ll tell you, it’s because I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk your lives against my pride.”
― K.S. Villoso, Jaeth's Eye

“Do mages land on their feet, like cats? Because I swear to Sakku if you don’t shut up and leave right now I’m going to push you through that window.” The tone of her voice must have got to him, then, because he finally got up. He sulked along the wall for a few moments, hoping perhaps that she would change her mind, which made her start thinking that strangling was so unsophisticated; it was probably easier to cut him with a knife and drop all the bits in the lake for the fish to feed on.”
― K.S. Villoso, Jaeth's Eye

“Everything is cursed in one form or another,” Enosh said, snorting. He didn’t even glance up. “The mages of Enji have kept invaders at bay for centuries by inventing these stories. I walked barefoot around the lake when we first arrived. You don’t see eyes growing out of my legs.”

“Well,” Kefier said. “Not yet.”
― K.S. Villoso, Jaeth's Eye

“Ancient oak, actually, is what the boy used to call her, back when he was still a boy. Like all men, he had aged too fast. She still remembers long, summer nights back in Hafod, when she would bake bread with the windows open while he would take his crutches to read his books on the kitchen table. He used to tell her how much he loved her bread, that he thinks it is the most wonderful thing in the world. He was always a flatterer, that one.”
― K.S. Villoso, Jaeth's Eye

“Remember,” he said, not realizing the floodgates he would open by raising his children, his son, the way he did. “The world as you see it was not made brick by brick, every piece falling where it must. What you see is the overlap, what is left when all mistakes have been made—castles built from rubble, broken things passing for whole. A battle lost can be fought again, if you know to pick up the weapons of the fallen and arm the ones who stand. Not many realize this. Most think the fates decide, and like fools let fate dictate the rest of their lives. Follow your heart. It will see you through the darkness and guide you through hellfire.”
― K.S. Villoso, Sapphire's Flight

“She craned her neck to the side, stretching it. “When you reach my age, it’s sometimes hard to remember the shape of your life as it once was. Once, I carried that bedraggled rat on my shoulders, much like you do with your girl. I would take him to the beach before lunch-time and think that I would never tire of watching him squeal as the sand sinks around his toes, such precious toes. Now his squealing sounds like wheels in much need of oiling, and if they don’t grate my old bones, they make me snore. I don’t even want to think about what his toes might look like.”

“Sorrow,” she said with a smile, “is not always tragic.”
― K.S. Villoso, Aina's Breath

“She felt fear: that same, dark, shuddering fear that consumed her the night she birthed her daughter, the same, writhing panic when she looked into the dark, trusting eyes. She had wanted to drop the infant and run screaming. Unseen forces had stilled her arms. Choking back that fear had been the hardest thing, like greeting a murderer’s swinging knife with a smile on your face.”
― K.S. Villoso, Aina's Breath

“I am not your father, he thought, but he tugged at the blanket so he could see the tiny, wrinkled face, and the words, and all he knew of the world, melted behind him. She had her father’s eyes and his father’s fingers, and also skin the hue of amber, too much like his own. This child that was not his had the audacity to look like him.”
― K.S. Villoso, Aina's Breath

“By all the gods,” she eventually murmured, turning to him. “I can hear the echoes of time roaring in the space between your ears.”
― K.s. villoso, Aina's Breath

“Sent word, did you?” Narani murmured, pushing past him and shuffling her hips. “It better be warm. This weather is detestable. And this stench…! Worse than my son’s quarters, and it’s not even mid-day. Why is your mouth open like that? Are you trying to attract flies?”

“I’m just surprised you referred to him as ‘your son’.”

“Well, you birth a head that size once, you don’t forget it. Now walk a little faster before my hip decides to pop out on you.”
― K.S. Villoso, Aina's Breath

“If you think that, then you, sir, are just as unacquainted with my sort of tenacity. I’d sooner let rats crawl out of my ass.”

“Actually, maybe I’ll stay,” Enosh said. “That might prove amusing.”
― K.S. Villoso, Aina's Breath

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I know that I’m supposed to stand here and bear it all, that there are more important things to worry about. We hear stories about heroes of old and tell ourselves that we can be like that, too, brave and daring and impervious, only that’s not how it works, you see? Not all of us can be so selfless or so strong.”
― K.S. Villoso, Sapphire's Flight