Quotes from book
Tigana

Name: Tigana
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay

Tigana is a 1990 fantasy novel by Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay. The novel is set in a fictional world, in a region called the Peninsula of the Palm, which somewhat resembles renaissance Italy as well as the Peloponnese in shape.

“I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 1 (p. 14)

“Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 17 (p. 561)

“By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana

“Only then, invisible to everyone and with her curtains drawn, did she allow her tears to fall: in love, and for his hurts, and in terrible pride.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana

“The heart has its own laws… and the truth is… the truth is that you are the law of mine.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana

“There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Part 3 “Ember to Ember”, Chapter 10 (p. 317)
Source: Tigana (1990)

“In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 19 (p. 613)

“Ice is for death and endings.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana

“Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 77)

“It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Part 5, “The Memory of a Flame”, Chapter 17 (p. 541)
Tigana (1990)

“Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 8 (p. 225)

“Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 15 (p. 461)

“He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Part 4 “The Price of Blood”, Chapter 14 (p. 443)
Tigana (1990)

“When power is gone the memory of power lingers.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Part 1 “A Blade in the Soul”, Chapter 1 (p. 9)
Tigana (1990)

“A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once…We can never truly know the path we have not walked.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 79)

““The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.” He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. “Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.””

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Part 2 “Dianora”, Chapter 7 (p. 184)
Tigana (1990)

“The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. “Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.”
Part 2 “Dianora”, Chapter 7 (p. 184)
Tigana (1990)