Tanith Lee Quotes

She had never acquired in-between shades of character, had not had the opportunity. She had been utterly selfish, and was now selfless, because she had never become a whole person, did not like herself, or know herself. Nor had she ever gained sufficient wisdom to be properly horrified at what she meant to do. She couldn’t think that intensely.

What's Hell?" inquired Wild-Eye. "You should visit before you pass judgement on a place. And have you never heard it said, the Dark One is a gentleman?

Resist. Come, you’re tough enough, my lady, aren’t you, if you beg for death rather than inflict evil?

Lir chiseled at the stone. It would take a month to make a perceptible impression on it. He had a few hours. Work harder, then.

The countryside meant grain and herds, and a river meant fish. And if the sky meant anything, it meant a cruel God who took no notice of their pains and chastised them if they sinned.

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.

The antithesis of myself. No fervor in him, no greed for life, only his ruthless craving to possess, which took no pleasure in possession.

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

I had made vows and to spare, but the present cannot be ruled forever by the past.

I found a glimmering brown skull in the snow. I could not tell if it was mortal or god, and there seemed a sobering moral in that.

Westward and inland there was a form of government, some prince or other sitting on his backside ordering this or that.

In the tales of many lands, the prophet goes forth into the wilderness, the waste of sand or snow, or aloft on the barren black mountain, and when he returns to the people his eyes are great and luminous, his face is altered; he tells them he has seen God. I will suppose that God, if He is anywhere, is to be found in men, the nugget of gold buried inside the mud. I will suppose, too, that the wilderness washes off for a moment, or forever, the mud and the clay. Perhaps, then, the returning prophet should not say, “I have seen God”; but rather, “I have seen myself.”

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

Destiny or gods or fortune—whatever one is pleased or innocent enough to call them—they seal men to their decree.

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.