Top 15 Tanith Lee Quotes

The Prince then remembered the white-haired Theel in the Castle of Bone, who had also been kind, if a little odd, and he wondered why such nice creatures always seemed to live in bad places with wicked things going on all around them.
“That’s easy,” said the girl, seeming to read his thoughts as the other Theel had done. “The bad places are where we can do the most good.”

But what am I to do?" cried the Prince.
"What you feel you must," said the Theel. "That's the only thing to do at any time.

The harshest lesson of all was that which ran contrary to the teaching of his own personality.

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.

Why," she said, "did they leave their kingdom to us?"
"As well ask why they brought our ancestors to this star. Oh, yes, I think our races were taken from some other planet entirely, to be their toy. If we guess them to be gods, why stint them? Their avarice and callousness would be gargantuan. We can hardly fail to see that.

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

It was idiotic to be superstitious.

Ceedres was her god. To be happy, she must worship him, and let him destroy her, and take pleasure in it.

I can't guess," said Olvia, "why he accepted my invitation. If I had realized he would, I would never have sent it.

But among the aristocrats whose existence could be lengthily prolonged into three or four hundred spans, boredom came to be the killer, a bizarre running down, a sort of decline and decay, nonphysical but fatal.

In our place, we can hardly go backward, but neither should we ignore the nakedness of humanity before the huge-wheeled vehicle of progress. We have too much to give, and far too much to learn, to throw ourselves away.

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 partial silence, the ocean asserted itself, waves hurled loudly against rock, slithering back with smashed spines, then, healed by immersion, hurled forward again.

She had no reason not to believe in the impossible. Desperation was always ready to pray for miracles.

Nothing can be learned without some measure of risk, and, more vital still, of patience.