Sailing to Sarantium Quotes

“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, 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, Sailing to Sarantium

“Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, 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, 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, Sailing to Sarantium

“Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“Small things change a life. Change lives.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, 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, 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, Sailing to Sarantium

“You do not honour them by living as if you, too, have died”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“Could one forget how to be free?”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“It was so strange to realize how it was only at this brink of the chasm, threshold of the dark or the god's holy light, that one could grasp and accept one's own heart's yearning for more of the world. For life.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, 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, Sailing to Sarantium

“But Crispin had had three souls in Jad's creation to live with and love, and all three were gone. Was the knowledge of other losses to assuage his own? Sometimes, half asleep at night in the house, a wine flask empty by his bed, he would lie in the dark and think he heard breathing, a voice, one of the girls crying aloud in her dreams in the next room.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“I am,” said Astorgus, mildly, “thirty-nine years old. Yes, I want to retire.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“Her mother used to call her erimitsu, "clever one" in their own dialect... Kasia had a reputation already that made her almost unmarriageable at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft figures -- promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily birthed.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“elle semblait également capable de lire ses pensées. Le sourire était de retour : « Tu es excité, maintenant ? Intrigué ? Tu aimes, alors, que tes femmes manifestent une certaine faiblesse, Rhodien ? Dois-je m’en souvenir, et de l’oreiller ? » Il rougit, mais rencontra sans fléchir le regard sarcastique : « J’aime que les êtres qui participent à ma vie révèlent… un peu de leur vraie nature. Sans calcul. En dehors du jeu dont vous parliez. Cela me séduirait, oui. »”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Voile vers Sarance

“Dois-je me laisser soudoyer par une chevelure de femme éparpillée sur mon oreiller pour une nuit ou une matinée ? » Il hésita : « Même la vôtre ? » Le sourire reparut alors, énigmatique et provocant. « Cela arrive, murmura-t-elle. Parfois pour plus d’une nuit. Ou la nuit dure… plus longtemps qu’une nuit ordinaire. Le temps se déroule de façon étrange, en certaines circonstances. En as-tu jamais pris conscience,”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Voile vers Sarance

“Mais l’alchimie a toujours été un art ésotérique. Je le savais lorsque j’ai commencé à l’étudier. Je suis… réconcilié avec ce savoir. J’exulterai en mon for intérieur, dans le plus grand secret. »”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Voile vers Sarance

“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 an autumn tree, helpless in the wind.
He might be, all men and women might be as helpless as that leaf, but he would not admit it, and he would do something here on the dome that said-or aspired to say-these things, and more.
He had journeyed here to do this. Had done his sailing and was still sailing, perhaps, and would put into mosaics of the Sanctuary as much of the living journey and what lay within it and behind is as his craft and desire could encompass.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, 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, Sailing to Sarantium