Tanith Lee Quotes

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

Let us prove to the world that superstition is idiocy and all the demons are dust.

All in all he had not done badly out of the war, but the smells of it, the sights of it, and the cries of pain that attended it like the vultures, had sickened and soured him. Yes, he could fight well enough. And kill efficiently. He feared death, like other men, but could put that from his mind in battle, and he was no fool with a sword or knife. But several smoking ruins ago there had come a curious shift inside himself. He had lost his sense of purpose in the war; he supposed because it was not truly his own purpose but that of the King.

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

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.

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.

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.

He has been described as having a dancer’s body, a wrestler’s shoulders, a pianist’s hands, the legs of a marathon runner, the face of a young god, and the hair of a Renaissance prince. None of these descriptions seemed, to the off-hand observer, to be inaccurate.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

He walked up to the high roof where the beacon was lit at night to jog the gods’ amnesia.