Tanith Lee Quotes
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I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.
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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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'All my life,' I said, 'knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.'
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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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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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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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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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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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I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.
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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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'What do I care for the god?' the woman suddenly screamed, catching up her dead child. 'What god is he that takes away my son and leaves me nothing?'
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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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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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'Sometimes, Skorous,' Draco said, 'you are a fool.''Sometimes I am not alone in that.'
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We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.
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Precognition or self-deception?
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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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'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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There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope.
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Kernik had stumbled on an immutable truth, a truth older than the world. Priests claimed the gods made men, but this was not so. Men made the gods. Firstly, by forming them in clay, by chipping them from stone. Secondly, and more importantly, by believing in them, believing in them utterly.
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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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No one is ever ordinary.
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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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There were clouds like sharks with open jaws in the sky that morning.