Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid, and new.

There was no way to take the story back, folding it neatly into the place I'd kept it all this time. No matter what else happened, from here on out, I would always remember Wes, because with this telling, he'd become part of that story, of my story, too.

Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens... this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

What business does memory have with time?

There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.

You gotta tell the story the way that it happened to you and the way you experienced it.

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.