Tanith Lee Quotes
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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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'Can I appeal?''Oh yes.''Will it do any good?''None whatsoever.'
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There were clouds like sharks with open jaws in the sky that morning.
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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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I know the old ways. There’s nothing evil there, only strange, and not even strange when you know it.
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Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.
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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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'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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'All my life,' I said, 'knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.'
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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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What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.