A Song for Arbonne Quotes

“We must be what we are, or we become our enemies. ”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“For all his frustrations and his chronic sense of being overburdened. He was proud of that; he’d always felt that it was worth doing a task properly if it was worth doing at all. That was part of his problem, of course; that was why he ended up with so much to do. It was also the source of his own particular pride: he knew--and he was certain they knew that there was no one else who could handle details such as these as well as he.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake.

All the vines are ripening
And the trees come into bud,
For my love's footsteps passing by
Are summoning the spring.

Rian's stars in the night
Shine more brightly over her,
The god's moon and the goddess's
Guard her with their light.

Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“It is no peace of mine”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“The problem was, it was as easy to be killed on a foolish quest in the company of fools as on an adventure of merit beside men one respected and trusted.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“And so saw, by a trick, an angle, a flaring of torchlight far down the dark river, how the arrow—white-feathered, she would remember, white as innocence, as winter in midsummer, as death—fell from the summit of its long, high arc to take the coran in the shoulder, driving him, slack and helpless, from the rope into the river amid laughter turned to screaming in the night.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“False. I will always be a Savaric, my lord. Do not deceive yourself. What I was born to may not be taken from me.' She hesitates. 'It may only be added to.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“Rudel Correze is far from the first to seek to aid me in my passage to Rian. But I find myself still among the living, and I have discovered that I value this world for itself, not merely as a matter for someone's song. I love it for its heady wines and its battles, for the beauty of its women and their generosity and their pride, for the companionship of brave men and clever ones, the promise of spring in the depths of winter and the even surer promise that Rian and Corannos are waiting for us, whatever we may do. And I find now, your highness, long past the fires of my heart's youth and yours, that there is one thing I love more, even more than the music that remains my release from pain.'
'Love, de Talair? This is a word I did not expect to hear from you. I was told you foreswore it more than twenty years ago. The whole world was speaking of that. This much I am certain I remember. My information, so far distant in our cold north, seems to have been wrong in yet another matter. What is the one thing, then, my lord duke? What is it you still love?'
'Arbonne.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“I have no right to ask for anything,' he heard his brother whisper. Blaise looked over his shoulder then and saw Rosala standing there, tall and grave. 'I know you do not,' she agreed quietly, adhering, even at the last, to her own inner laws. 'But I have the right to grant what I wish.' She said, very calmly, 'It was bravely done at the end, Ranald.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“There was a familiar, hard bitterness in him now, and a curiosity he could not deny, and a third thing, like the quickening hammer of a pulse, beneath both of these.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“What I was born to may not be taken from me.' She hesitates. 'It may only be added to.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“I know. Almost certain, not quite. I enjoyed your thinking that. I hope it was in you like poison all these years.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“What is my sin, Blaise? Rudel was like that. A knife in the voice and in the thought behind. Quicksilver bright, insubstantial as a moon on water sometimes, then sharp and merciless and deadly as ... as an arrow dipped in syvaren. And the sharpness in his perceptions, as much as in anything else. A man from whom it was difficult to hide.

For the sin, the transgression, lay— and Rudel knew it, they both knew it — in his having given Blaise exactly what he wanted.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn’t have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“He was still on his feet, and before him was a man who stood in the path of...what? Of a great many things, his own dream of Gorhaut not least of all. Of what his home should be, in the eyes of the world, in the sight of Corannos, in his own soul. He had said this two nights ago, words very like this, King Daufridi of Valensa. He's been asked if he loved his country.
He did. He loved it with a heart that ached like an old man's fingers in rain, hurting for the Gorhaut of his own vision, a land worthy of the god who had chosen it, and of the honour of men. Not a place of scheming wiles, of a degraded, sensuously corrupt king, of people dispossessed of their lands by a cowardly treaty, or of ugly designs under the false, perverted aegis of Corannos for nothing less than annihilation here south of the mountains.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne