Tanith Lee Quotes

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

Sometimes the communications between these two partners are so complex, and have so many permutations, that I can't follow them. Their relationship seems to be a little like chess, but without the rules.

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.

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.

Of the rest, nothing further is said, save that lovers love and live and, in due season, as all men must, they also die. And so with Ezail and Chavir who had been Sovaz and Oloru, Azhriaz and Chuz. For such was and is mortal life, mortal death. But for love, who can predict or measure, plot, ascribe, or declare an end. Love is one of the immortals.

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

The groaning and the screaming, the prayers—useless and known to be useless—the exhortations, scrabbling attempts at exodus, the burrowings that would yield no safety, the ecstasies of madness and immolation—each and all occurred: the correct paraphernalia of catastrophe. But, seen from the heavens, what was it but a fomentation in a hill of termites? That which is so small cannot be important.

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.

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

In the land of my childhood there was a saying, as follows: 'The black rose does not anywhere grow. Therefore let us fondly believe in the blooming of the black rose.'"
"Where I shall feast presently,"said Azhrarn, "black roses are woven in the garlands. Enlighten them therefore in your childhood's land: The black rose blooms. No longer believe in the black rose."
"Zhoreb—what shall we do?"
"There is nothing to be done. Demons exist." And then Zhoreb smiled and added under his breath, "Therefore we need not believe in them.

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.

Your beauty leaves me breathless," said Pereban.
"Yet you find the breath to say so.

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

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.

“What else is she like?”
The Eshva sighed at the touch of Azhrarn’s fingers. The sigh said this: Like a white moth at dusk, a night-blooming lily. Like music played by the reflection of a swan as it passes over the strings of a moonlit lake.