Tanith Lee Quotes
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There were clouds like sharks with open jaws in the sky that morning.
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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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We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less. The mountain road which led us here was built by a dead people none of us would remember otherwise. What we create is the only part of us which can survive, or has the right to. Man is nothing, except to other men.
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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 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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'Can I appeal?''Oh yes.''Will it do any good?''None whatsoever.'
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I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.
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Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.
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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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'When will they fight?' I asked.'Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.'I laughed. 'I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.'
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The sun in his golden chariot had driven almost to the last meadow of the sky.
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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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What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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'All my life,' I said, 'knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.'