Under Heaven Quotes

“How we remember changes how we have lived.
Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Full moon is falling through the sky.
Cranes fly through clouds.
Wolves howl. I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.

Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.

You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Truth" when examining events and records of the past was always precarious, uncertain. No man could say for certain how the river of time would have flowed, cresting or receding, bringing floods or gently watering fields, had a single event, or even many, unfolded differently.

It is in the nature of existence under heaven, the dissenting scholars wrote, that we cannot know these things with clarity. We cannot live twice, or watch as moments of the past unfurl, like a courtesan's silk fan. The river flows, the dancers finish their dance. If the music starts again it is starting anew, not repeating itself.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the reader, not move it further away. It is more than an escape. When we read of the only daughter of a fisherman (or the third son of a woodcutter) in a fairy tale, we are all that character. That's the underlying pulse beat of such tales. Using the fantastic as a prism for the past, if done properly, removes the tale from distancing specificity. It can't just be read as unique to a time and place; it is universalized in interesting, powerful ways. When I wrote Tigana, about the way tyranny tries to erase identity in conquered peoples, the fantasy setting seems to have done exactly that: I'm asked in places ranging from Korea to Poland to Croatia to Quebec, "Were you writing about us?"

I was. All of them. That is the point. The fantastic is a tool in the writer's arsenal, as potentially powerful as any there is, and any tool we have works to the benefit of the reader.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“I didn't ask to be made a princess."

This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough.

"Who chooses their fate?" It is the third one, the tallest. "Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?"

"Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them?" she says, too quickly.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“And it is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn’t know which of them it was.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“He waited for his cup to be filled, then added softly, "We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects that folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Women have usually been better at this than men, haven’t they? Pursuing these subtleties?” “Women have no choice but to be this way if we want any kind of influence, or simply a little control of our own lives.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“A journey does not end when it ends.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“He had a vivid sense of roads forking, rivers branching, one of those moments where the life that follows cannot be as it might otherwise have been.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Full moon is falling through the sky.
Cranes fly through clouds.
Wolves howl. I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“I want to kill someone," Tai said.

A pause to consider this. "I am familiar with the desire. It is sometimes effective. Not invariably.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Here the world is all the world may be”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“I broke willow twigs when you left,
My tears fell with the rain.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“They’d been painful against her spine…she’s more accustomed to them now. A person, a woman, can adapt to more than she might of thought she could; what she’s unsure about is when that stops being a virtue and turns to something else.. leaving you too much changed, undefined, unanchored… like a fisherman’s empty boat drifting on a river, with no way to be returned to where it belongs.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Sometimes the one life we are allowed is enough.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“There comes a point when life is not worth enduring if one steps back.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Back in that summer when the rebels came, his task, as he came to understand it, was straightforward: to preserve order in one small place, one household, in a world that had lost all sense of order or claim to being civilized. He didn’t give it a great deal of thought, caught up in his day-to-day tasks, but one morning, in autumn, it suddenly came to him that the men and women here in Master Shen Tai’s compound trusted him completely, relied upon him, were doing whatever he ordered, for reasons that went beyond rank or deference. He was keeping them alive.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“He’d stopped permitting himself to be unhappy about it.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“One of the pleasures of dealing with intelligent men, Lin Fong decided, watching seven people ride out the eastern gate in early-morning sunlight, was how much did not have to be spoken.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“painted moth-eyebrows,”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Men changed during wars or conflict, sometimes beyond recognition. Tai”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven