Tanith Lee Quotes
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'Like most loners,' said Moddik, 'you carry the seeds of violent authority. Loners need to be bossy. They quickly learn it’s the only method they have of shoving people off their backs.'
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The sun in his golden chariot had driven almost to the last meadow of the sky.
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There were clouds like sharks with open jaws in the sky that morning.
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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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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.
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White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled.
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The irony of her story is merely that her love became, in the end, her motive rather than her goal, the doorway rather than the house.
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What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.
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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.
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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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'Can I appeal?''Oh yes.''Will it do any good?''None whatsoever.'
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I know the old ways. There’s nothing evil there, only strange, and not even strange when you know it.
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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.
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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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It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance.
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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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I began to feel lighthearted. Don’t ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe.
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She had never acquired in-between shades of character, had not had the opportunity. She had been utterly selfish, and was now selfless, because she had never become a whole person, did not like herself, or know herself. Nor had she ever gained sufficient wisdom to be properly horrified at what she meant to do. She couldn’t think that intensely.
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'Sorry,' I said sweetly, 'I’m the new one with the quick temper and the uncontrollable homicidal tendencies.'
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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.
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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.'
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This was the custom of the tribes, and perhaps, in the fogs of their pasts, the scheme had had its reasons. Yet like many of their ways, only the peel remained, the fruit was long gone.
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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.
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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.