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Quote by Guy Gavriel Kay

“It ought never to have been so swift, so much like a dance or a dream. It was as if there had been music playing somewhere, almost but not quite heard. He had fought those five men side-by-side with Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo, whom he had never seen in his life, and it had been as nothing had ever been before, on a battlefield or anywhere else. It had felt weirdly akin to having doubled himself. To fighting as if there were two hard-trained bodies with the one controlling mind. They hadn't spoken during the fight. No warnings, tactics. It hadn't even lasted long enough for that. He ought to have been elated after such a triumph, perhaps curious, intrigued. He was deeply unsettled instead. Restless. Even a little afraid, if he was honest with himself... Come, brother; Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo had said today as five hard men with swords had walked forward to encircle the two of them. Shall we show them how this is done? They had shown them. Brother. He had looked at Belmonte after, and had seen - with relief and apprehension, both - a mirror image of that same strangeness. As if something had gone flying away from each of them and was only just coming back. The Valledan had looked glazed, unfocused. At least, Ammar had thought, it isn't only me.”

Quote by Guy Gavriel Kay

Work

The Lions of Al-Rassan

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Author

Guy Gavriel Kay
Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay is a renowned Canadian fantasy author, born on November 7, 1954. His works are celebrated for their rich imagination and profound cultural depth, enjoying great popularity among readers. more

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“But she had never, ever heard Rodrigo speak of another man the way he'd talked about Ammar ibn Khairan during the long, waiting winter just past. The way the man sat a horse, handled a blade, a bow, devised strategies, jested, spoke of history, geography, the properties of good wine. Even the way he wrote poetry. "Are you in love with this man?" she'd asked her husband once in Fezana that winter - more than half jealous, if truth were told. "I suppose I am, in a way," Rodrigo had replied after a moment. "Isn't it odd." It wasn't, really, Miranda thought, on that hill by Silvenes.”

“London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith... Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a in a green dress in a square. ‘It has flowered,’ the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o'clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.”

“...it was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid's laughter — intangible things you couldn't lay your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immoveable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa's Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré's dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner.”

“I've got so used to my life being challenging and fraught with danger that I don't question it any more. Whether I’m knocking on the door of a hardcore sex shop, walking through suburban streets being verbally abused and spat on, or being threatened on the tube, I don't give in. I don’t dress normally to have an easy life. The pilgrimage down the King’s Road to get to the Shop (Sex: everyone calls it ‘the Shop’), the place I want to hang out and buy stuff, is one of the scariest things I do — running the gauntlet of teds who want to kill people like me — but nothing will stop me looking the way I want. It’s a commitment.”