Tanith Lee Quotes
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Tonight it was to be a play for aristocrats to watch, concerning gods and shepherds; it was the humble villages that clamored for princesses and emperors.
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'Sometimes, Skorous,' Draco said, 'you are a fool.''Sometimes I am not alone in that.'
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I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.
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'I think Kathaos fears no divine forces.''Then he’s a brave man.''Oh, men make their own gods,' Yannul remarked. 'I have a god with a fat belly, and a house full of expensive women to attend his every need, and I call him Yannul the Lan in Five Years from This.'
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It was, therefore, the sort of loveliness which is not perfect, but draws its charm from a measure of imbalance, which can accommodate flaws and make little of them, for a while at least.
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The bird stabs the worm, the big cat breaks the bird’s neck, the man casts his spear into the heart of the cat. That is how the world is. Even the man had better look behind him; the wolf may be near, or another man, or fate, the hungriest hunter of them all.
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As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.
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I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?
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We should go and ask the princess for help. She seems very nice, and she’s much too beautiful to be unkind.
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He showed no fear. It seemed that, at the commencement, his race had known gods and no other. Gods had bound and ill treated and slaughtered and played with them. Gods were a fact, as were the sun and the shaking of the earth. Just another terrible reality.
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And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me.
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I raised my arms as if in prayer and heard the mutter of response behind me. Then I scattered the dried grains, red and brown and black, and studied the patterns they formed on the stone ledge before Sibbos. This is not such a mystic thing. You see what it is sensible to see, or else you interpret what you see so that the meaning comes out as you want it.
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No one is ever ordinary.
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'All my life,' I said, 'knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.'
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This sight was terrible, more terrible than words convey, for words are cowards as men are, and hide things as men do.
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'Now you understand,' Rarm said to me. 'It was the last cut against yourself to become convinced of your own hideousness. You held to it and nurtured it, and even identified with the devil goddess of Orash in your determination to be accursed. And it never occurred to you that perhaps you saw a false image under the mountain.'
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A man hunted only for food or clothing or in self-defense. It was another mark of the effete and the sadistic to take life as a sport.
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We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.
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Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.
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I am alone. No one stands beside me. I have no Dark Prince to ride in my chariot, to walk with me, to hold me to him. I have no one. And yet. I myself, at last, I have myself. And to me, at this time, it seems enough. It seems more, much more, than enough.
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Lir chiseled at the stone. It would take a month to make a perceptible impression on it. He had a few hours. Work harder, then.
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Naturally, the little wars were dressed up in ritual and significance. War spear challenge was followed by war dance, and invocation of demons, the one-eyed snake and diverse totems. I bowed to none of these, having seen early the vulgarity and impotence of the tribal pantheon. Generally men create gods in their own image.
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I would be a drudge now, among the tents, and I would kneel before the warriors, and run from them when they shouted at me. I would be a woman, as women were reckoned in this place, a half-souled, witless animal, created to bear and pleasure men: an afterthought of the god.
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Pirates have always fascinated me.