Tanith Lee

Odd, how different different men’s fears could be.

— Tanith Lee

He had been too near the hard facts of religions as a child to find it soothing.

— 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

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

I know the old ways. There’s nothing evil there, only strange, and not even strange when you know it.

— Tanith Lee

When you fell in the sea, you should have heard them cheer. I made them rope the yard and fish you up. I said a ducking in water washes the witch-skill out of a woman until next full moon, and it would be bad luck to let you drown. How about that for a clever story? They’d believe anything if you make it sound silly enough.

— Tanith Lee

Spells are words, and words are merely noises. You are the sorceress, not your instruction. Don’t limit yourself.

— Tanith Lee

There were clouds like sharks with open jaws in the sky that morning.

— Tanith Lee

“Sometimes, Skorous,” Draco said, “you are a fool.”“Sometimes I am not alone in that.”

— 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

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.

— Tanith Lee

It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance.

— 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

Sickness, the serpent, is coming to bite you,Rest uneasy, you stinking carrion, on your gold beds.

— Tanith Lee

“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?”

— 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

And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me.

— 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

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

Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

Vazkor had picked his creatures well—narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.

— Tanith Lee

I would be a drudge now, among the tents, and I would kneel before the warriors, and run from them when they shouted at me. I would be a woman, as women were reckoned in this place, a half-souled, witless animal, created to bear and pleasure men: an afterthought of the god.

— Tanith Lee

“When will they fight?” I asked.I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.”

— Tanith Lee

True beauty is always oddly surprising.

— Tanith Lee

“All my life,” I said, “knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.”

— Tanith Lee

“Uasti was a good teacher,” he said. “She made you look a little way into yourself, see what you could become.”

— Tanith Lee

“Don’t judge yourself,” he said. “None of us are ever good at it.”

— Tanith Lee

“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.”

— 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

“Is it the regency you want, or me?”“The regency. You, sweetheart, are the worthless dross that comes with it.”

— Tanith Lee

“Anackire asks nothing because she needs nothing, being everything,” Raldnor said tightly, using a quotation of the temple.“Such undemanding gods.”

— Tanith Lee

“I think Kathaos fears no divine forces.”“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.”

— Tanith Lee

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

Such an accusation is as stupid as it is absurd.

— 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

What a son I’ve made. The midwives must have turned me in my labor so that I lay on your brain and crushed it.

— Tanith Lee

There was no room in him for curiosity; The capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul.

— Tanith Lee

“I have a plan,” said Xaros, “improbable only in its genius.”

— Tanith Lee

Men think for themselves when they’re men.

— Tanith Lee

Thinta flew safely, and I realized how much I preferred being with Hergal and feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright. Actually when I’m with Hergal I always realize how much I prefer being with Thinta and not feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright.

— Tanith Lee

Anyhow, I arrived, and I did feel pretty weird, actually, as if I’d left something behind. My head or something.

— Tanith Lee

“Can I appeal?”“None whatsoever.”

— Tanith Lee

“Sorry,” I said sweetly, “I’m the new one with the quick temper and the uncontrollable homicidal tendencies.”

— Tanith Lee

They were very careful and kind. So careful and kind it was positively tactless and spiteful.

— 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

Somewhere in me was a rod of steel to which I clung. I’d had a vision, as good as any vision given to any poet, sage, or prophet in the past. I wasn’t elated, I wasn’t confident even, but somehow, I knew, and with the end of doubt had come the death of despair.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

I see you laugh, and rightly so. What is this silly old fool rambling on about? Good for you. Never respect years, only deeds.

— Tanith Lee

“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.”

— Tanith Lee

“Well now,” he said, “was I as good as you were when you were me?”

— Tanith Lee

The sun in his golden chariot had driven almost to the last meadow of the sky.

— 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

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

Night, the dark widow, came walking on the hills.

— Tanith Lee

It was as easy to be alone with six kin as it is to be alone by yourself, and maybe easier.

— Tanith Lee

Who knew? If the illusion is quite perfect, who is to say it is not real?

— Tanith Lee

When a road is very dark it is hard to see the milestones on it.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

They say the promise of a witch is like a plain woman, seldom remembered.

— Tanith Lee

Having failed, do you accept failure, saying only: Well, it is so. I will turn to other things? When night comes, do you accept the blackness of it, saying only: Well, it is so. I will turn and wait for morning? Or do you go on striving to light a candle against that dark however often the wind blows out the flame, however often the night returns?

— Tanith Lee

This sight was terrible, more terrible than words convey, for words are cowards as men are, and hide things as men do.

— Tanith Lee

Woana was the most talented, amazing and prodigious human in the world, and the most beautiful too. For Woana, if she had summoned them, those bright eyes in the sky would have danced down to earth; but naturally Woana was far too sophisticated to stoop to such a thing. Woana was, in fact, unrivalled, peerless. The reason being that Mitz belonged to her, and Mitz’s feline ego would never consider that anyone, but the most sublime, could have acquired her own exceptional self.

— Tanith Lee

What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

The moon walks east of midnight,I will not sing your tune.

— Tanith Lee

Rewa was brave. At least, she was thick-witted enough to be able to ignore personal danger to a great extent.

— Tanith Lee

At some point, Dekteon saw, his own world had come close to such a religion, where women ruled and men died—but the road had taken a different turning. Now the hints of the ancient mystery remained only in songs. It was the men who were the masters. Maybe not for the better, and not for the worse, either. But all this was unimportant.

— Tanith Lee

The sacrifice lives, but the sun’s still shining.

— Tanith Lee

The rites were just the husks left over from deeper things, no pith remaining and no mystery, nothing to lift up the soul or go to the brain like wine. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

Now I saw braves hang themselves with amulets, leave tidbits for spirits, and still take an arrow in the neck. I, worshiping nothing and bribing nothing with prayers, rode among an enemy unscathed, scything them like summer wheat.

— Tanith Lee

A few old men began to say there had been a winter like this when they were warriors, and that it was a year of catastrophe and disappointment. But old men will ever spin this wheel. The summers were always hotter and the winters colder in the days of their strength, and the air thick with epic drama and portent.

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.

— 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

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

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.

— Tanith Lee

I said, “When you are on your deathbed, Erran, pray that you never meet me in the place you are going to.”

— Tanith Lee

Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.

— Tanith Lee

The sea was a phenomenon I had never clapped eyes on for myself, yet it seemed, from the tales, a destination ultimate and uncompromising. The ocean’s edge, the brink of the land; the lip of Chaos.

— Tanith Lee

We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.

— Tanith Lee

That evening I met a black witch with a red cat, walking on a headland above the sea.I had reached the sea unexpectedly, but the sea is unexpected in any event to one who has never known it. You think it land at first, or sky, and penultimately mist. Then you realize a vast azure mass of water lies like a dragon in the sun’s last rays, breathing and shifting on the beaches.

— Tanith Lee

As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.

— 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

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.

— Tanith Lee

Precognition or self-deception?

— Tanith Lee

Power is the wine after which all other wine is mud.

— Tanith Lee

Such is the civilizing effect of city life upon men. It kills the instincts and replaces them with extended noses.

— Tanith Lee

“Some god must be laughing somewhere.”“Some god is always laughing. That is, if you believe in them, which is surely enough to make them laugh.”

— Tanith Lee

There is no swifter way to make an enemy of a woman. You may tell her she is a clod or a bitch; as long as you lust for her, it will be forgiven. But say she is the wonder of the world and show her cold loins, and she will hate you till the sun goes out.

— Tanith Lee

I have seen women who thought they loved me look at me that way, and wolves which were hungry.

— Tanith Lee

Nothing breaks more quickly than corroded steel.

— Tanith Lee

Far too soon a man is in his grave, and how small are the hurricanes and mountains of his life—vengeance, love, might, and conquest—compared to that tiny heap of bone dust at its end.

— Tanith Lee

The plague came to be called Yellow Mantle. Men must name everything, as if, by giving it a name, they will decrease the nameless horror they experience.

— Tanith Lee

I had a rare wine in my blood. Expiation was over, guilt washed out, terror canceled.

— Tanith Lee

The grape of truth is often bitter, but not to taste it in its season would be to waste the vine.

— Tanith Lee

A tomb contains the dead, who are properly immobile and unspeaking. Though Masrians leave lamps for the ghosts, nobody expects they will be lighted.

— Tanith Lee

The absolute, as I had finally been shown, does not need the accompaniment of pipes and drums.

— Tanith Lee

It is a phenomenon of such spots that any noise is encapsulated in this ringing stillness, and made strangely tiny, however loud. The shouts of bandits and the squeaks of fauna sound as if confined in bubbles, a symbol of their impermanence. Only the desert endures.

— Tanith Lee

There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.

— Tanith Lee

“Why aid me?”“God has moved me to help you. Or, if you prefer, it was my reasonless inclination to do so.”

— Tanith Lee

I woke in the dawn. The plains of the Wilderness were exploding into light. It was the first hour of day, one of the two most beautiful hours of the desert, where sunrise and sunset are the queen and king.

— Tanith Lee

Destiny or gods or fortune—whatever one is pleased or innocent enough to call them—they seal men to their decree.

— Tanith Lee

He said quietly, “I see a jackal running. His name is I remember.”

— Tanith Lee

Westward and inland there was a form of government, some prince or other sitting on his backside ordering this or that.

— Tanith Lee

I found a glimmering brown skull in the snow. I could not tell if it was mortal or god, and there seemed a sobering moral in that.

— Tanith Lee

I had made vows and to spare, but the present cannot be ruled forever by the past.

— Tanith Lee

This much poison cannot pour in one’s ears without it will leave some trace.

— Tanith Lee

The antithesis of myself. No fervor in him, no greed for life, only his ruthless craving to possess, which took no pleasure in possession.

— Tanith Lee

At that, I understood for sure I must not lose her, for the earth is not the earth without some light to see it by, and she was mine.

— 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

Lir chiseled at the stone. It would take a month to make a perceptible impression on it. He had a few hours. Work harder, then.

— Tanith Lee

Resist. Come, you’re tough enough, my lady, aren’t you, if you beg for death rather than inflict evil?

— Tanith Lee

“What’s Hell?” inquired Wild-Eye. “You should visit before you pass judgement on a place. And have you never heard it said, the Dark One is a gentleman?”

— Tanith Lee

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.

— Tanith Lee

“But what am I to do?” cried the Prince.“What you feel you must,” said the Theel. “That’s the only thing to do at any time.”

— Tanith Lee

The Prince then remembered the white-haired Theel in the Castle of Bone, who had also been kind, if a little odd, and he wondered why such nice creatures always seemed to live in bad places with wicked things going on all around them.“That’s easy,” said the girl, seeming to read his thoughts as the other Theel had done. “The bad places are where we can do the most good.”

— 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