Tanith Lee Quotes

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

Don't judge yourself," he said. "None of us are ever good at it.

And in the manner of this ideal we strive, though even that not too onerously. For piety itself may be used to make a chain about the soul.

Sickness, the serpent, is coming to bite you,
Death, the old dark man, is coming to carry you off,
Rest uneasy, you stinking carrion, on your gold beds.

Self-love is neither fantasy nor vulgar joke. The totality of the “I,” the inbuilt survival and self-protective trait, is one of the most unshakable syndromes known to psycho-science.

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.”

What have you seen since last you looked on me?"
He said, "Misery and want, and fear, and death. I saw a beggar begging for help from a muddy stream. He told me it was as much use to do that as to beg help of heaven.

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.

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

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.

I think Kathaos fears no divine forces."
"Then he's a brave man."
"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.

Precognition or self-deception?

Various had been the cruelties of the goddess in the early years of her reign. At Azhrarn’s instruction she performed many deeds in order to educate the earth and the viciousness of the gods, and, more important, their indifference to all human suffering.

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.

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