Tanith Lee Quotes

Like many a longed-for gift, it was, in possession, unwelcome.

He said quietly, “I see a jackal running. His name is I remember.”

At that, I understood for sure I must not lose her, for the earth is not the earth without some light to see it by, and she was mine.

I said, “When you are on your deathbed, Erran, pray that you never meet me in the place you are going to.”

His creed, both cosmic and precise, had a flexible simplicity which, usually, was soon harnessed and complicated by his devotees, or those who had picked up some smattering.

There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.

No, she is cruel and pitiless and indifferent (which we have learned, through her teaching, the gods are to mankind—and indeed, have not the lessons of our lives ceaselessly informed us this was so?).

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

For, though sometimes worshipping gods, the Yunea did not permit itself to stray too far onto the abstract path of sheer faith. An ambience of security was all the aristocrats required, a guarantee that fate loved them.

It is perhaps a fact, that to the truly good, life, and the ways of men, and goodness itself, are very simple things. What to others appeared as her virtuousness, was to her merely her state of being. She did not set out to be good. She was good naturally, as another breathed. Hate and bitterness and envy and despair, those four envenomed serpents gnawing the livers of mankind, could not get in at her. But to herself she was nothing special; only herself to herself.

I woke in the dawn. The plains of the Wilderness were exploding into light. It was the first hour of day, one of the two most beautiful hours of the desert, where sunrise and sunset are the queen and king.

When a road is very dark it is hard to see the milestones on it.

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.

Truth is at the door, howling and stamping her foot. Truth is not always decorous.

Kernik had stumbled on an immutable truth, a truth older than the world. Priests claimed the gods made men, but this was not so. Men made the gods. Firstly, by forming them in clay, by chipping them from stone. Secondly, and more importantly, by believing in them, believing in them utterly.