Tanith Lee Quotes

The desert, like every landscape, had its own persona. It was a situation of white glare by day, white glare glimmering from the sands up into the atmosphere. Beneath, faintly showed the contours of the dunes as if through mist or water. Above, a flat coppery sky rested on the framework of the glare. Sometimes a formation of rock came swimming out of the glare like a great thorn-backed fish; items at a distance were of a tindery brittle blueness unlike the fluid blueness of a watered country.
The heat of the desert was not like a heat, but like a whittling away. There seem to sound in the desert, a high-pitched whistling, but there was no sound save the furnace wind raising the sand like smoke from the ridges, as if the dunes actually burned.
The word of the desert was this: I am made from all the dusts of the bones of men who have perished here, and my rocks are monuments to mountains I have ground away.
There were no green places, no springs. To this desert, such as these were wounds which it had healed with aridity. What it could not eradicate, it buried.
By night the sand chilled. Frost scaled its surfaces so it shone with a pure black shining. It was beautiful as only such a spot could be beautiful—because it had warped the natural laws, and here it told you the hideous was fair. And was believed.

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

In the tales of many lands, the prophet goes forth into the wilderness, the waste of sand or snow, or aloft on the barren black mountain, and when he returns to the people his eyes are great and luminous, his face is altered; he tells them he has seen God. I will suppose that God, if He is anywhere, is to be found in men, the nugget of gold buried inside the mud. I will suppose, too, that the wilderness washes off for a moment, or forever, the mud and the clay. Perhaps, then, the returning prophet should not say, “I have seen God”; but rather, “I have seen myself.”

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.

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

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

I began to feel lighthearted. Don’t ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe.

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.

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

Is the only challenge in the world to be greed and viciousness? Is the only satisfying power the power of the ascent over men, the only dream, ambition? And must the alternative to greed, evil, ambition—be only sluggishness?

We are taught that the gods do not care for us," said Pereban the priest. "Therefore we must seek for guidance in our own selves.

She had no reason not to believe in the impossible. Desperation was always ready to pray for miracles.

The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.

Fashions change. Even in mythology.

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