Tanith Lee Quotes

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 deeds of conquest and omnipotence have a sameness, as does the exposition of most evil.

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.

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

But in the mental overcast of that town, such things went rigidly unremarked, save through their irrelevance. For life was only a series of pitfalls, not to be enjoyed or celebrated. The gods chastised pleasure just as they ignored suffering.

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

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

“May the gods take note,” said he, “that it is my kind heart brought me to this predicament.” The gods, of course, did no such thing.

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.

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

Oh, dutiful daughter," said Azhrarn. "You are to be a goddess somewhere, for I would teach this world the nature of gods."
"And what is their nature?" she said.
"Indifferent and cruel. And loving not mankind.

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.

Apostasy fired her blood as love had done.

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

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.