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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.
Tanith Lee -
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.
Tanith Lee
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What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.
Tanith Lee -
If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.
Tanith Lee -
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.
Tanith Lee -
To fall suddenly sick when you have never been ill is a hard lesson. If it teaches anything, it teaches you that you must not trust to the thing you know, that it is better to build on shifting sand than the rock which may confound you on the day it shatters.
Tanith Lee -
We should go and ask the princess for help. She seems very nice, and she’s much too beautiful to be unkind.
Tanith Lee -
Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, a destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth, and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.
Tanith Lee
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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.
Tanith Lee -
The countryside meant grain and herds, and a river meant fish. And if the sky meant anything, it meant a cruel God who took no notice of their pains and chastised them if they sinned.
Tanith Lee -
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.
Tanith Lee -
I do not know why it distressed me so much to see an animal die when human death did not move me. Perhaps because they were more beautiful, and there is no corruption in them, while in the best of men there can always be found some guilt or wickedness which seems to have earned him death.
Tanith Lee -
I began to feel lighthearted. Don’t ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe.
Tanith Lee -
I should have felt pity, but I felt only contempt. I knew had it been a girl she would have mourned less, and it angered me.
Tanith Lee
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It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance.
Tanith Lee -
Strange, that when we feel we understand all things, we understand nothing. Strange, that when we feel we understand nothing, we have begun, at last, to understand.
Tanith Lee -
For an instant a half-formed prayer struggled into Havor’s mouth. But he could not utter it. Not for himself. For him those words were already drowned by the noise the thong-whip had made, or the sounds of children crying out of hunger or the cold or sheer misery in that grey house of orphans in the far North, eight years ago.
Tanith Lee -
True beauty is always oddly surprising.
Tanith Lee -
A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rorn god in the prow with a pound of incense.The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke....It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.
Tanith Lee -
'Sorry,' I said sweetly, 'I’m the new one with the quick temper and the uncontrollable homicidal tendencies.'
Tanith Lee
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I said, 'When you are on your deathbed, Erran, pray that you never meet me in the place you are going to.'
Tanith Lee -
Wealth, or large amounts of possessions seemed to him limiting. They brought their own prison with them. He preferred, since he had once known a kind of prison, to travel free.
Tanith Lee -
'‘Not everything that walks is a man,’' said the boulder conversationally, '‘and not everything that lies quiet is a stone,’ as the wolf remarked when the serpent bit him.'
Tanith Lee -
When a road is very dark it is hard to see the milestones on it.
Tanith Lee