Tanith Lee Quotes

“Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.”

Source: Wolf Star

“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.”

Source: Wolf Queen

Tanith Lee book Delusion's Master

Source: Delusion's Master

“It's lovely. I hate it.”

“I will draw you back to me. You shall see. By a chain of stars.”

Source: Wolf Queen

Tanith Lee Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

Source: Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

“It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence.”

Tanith Lee Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

Source: Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

Tanith Lee Quotes about men

“I do not know why it distressed me so much to see an animal die when human death did not move me. Perhaps because they were more beautiful, and there is no corruption in them, while in the best of men there can always be found some guilt or wickedness which seems to have earned him death.”

“Vazkor had picked his creatures well—narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.”

Book Two, Part IV “War March”, Chapter 3 (p. 246)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“Men think for themselves when they’re men.”

Book Two, Part V “Tower-Eshkorek”, Chapter 4 (p. 305)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“Odd, how different different men’s fears could be.”

Book 6, “Sunrise” Chapter 25 (p. 343)
The Storm Lord (1976)

“At some point, Dekteon saw, his own world had come close to such a religion, where women ruled and men died—but the road had taken a different turning. Now the hints of the ancient mystery remained only in songs. It was the men who were the masters. Maybe not for the better, and not for the worse, either. But all this was unimportant.”

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 1, “Avillis” (p. 7)

“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.”

Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 15, “Dekteon” (p. 163)

“He showed no fear. It seemed that, at the commencement, his race had known gods and no other. Gods had bound and ill treated and slaughtered and played with them. Gods were a fact, as were the sun and the shaking of the earth. Just another terrible reality.”

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 6 (p. 52)

Tanith Lee Quotes about God

“Now there was that look of waiting, and submission—not the frenzy of the stadium, but the quiet sleep-trance of belief. Something stirred in me at it, as I realized I had them in my palm. I stood very still in my white and black, holding the copper things in my hands, and then I began to walk between them toward the god. And I laughed at the god as I went toward him. You—what are you? And he had no answer for me, for here it was the priest who was the power, not the god, poor empty stone.”

Book Two, Part III “The Island”, Chapter 3 (p. 219)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“The rites were just the husks left over from deeper things, no pith remaining and no mystery, nothing to lift up the soul or go to the brain like wine. And, as generally happens, the more truth the ritual lost the more they bolstered it with significance. There is a saying among the Moi: The chief is clad in gold and purple, only the god dares to go naked.”

Book Two, Part I “Across the Ring”, Chapter 3 (p. 155)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rorn god in the prow with a pound of incense.
The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke…. It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.”

Book One, Part I “The Krarl”, Chapter 3 (p. 20)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

““What do I care for the god?” the woman suddenly screamed, catching up her dead child. “What god is he that takes away my son and leaves me nothing?””

Book 4, “Hell’s Blue Burning Seas” Chapter 15 (p. 208)
The Storm Lord (1976)

“Naturally, the little wars were dressed up in ritual and significance. War spear challenge was followed by war dance, and invocation of demons, the one-eyed snake and diverse totems. I bowed to none of these, having seen early the vulgarity and impotence of the tribal pantheon. Generally men create gods in their own image.”

Book Two, Part II “The Water”, Chapter 1 (p. 173)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.”

Book One, Part I “The Krarl”, Chapter 4 (p. 31)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Tanith Lee: Trending quotes

Tanith Lee book Delirium's Mistress

Source: Delirium's Mistress

“Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.”

“If you run away from trouble, it always follows.'
Rather my impression, too. Though that never stopped me trying.”

“The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it.”

Source: Wolf Tower

Tanith Lee Quotes

Tanith Lee book Death’s Master

Source: Death's Master

“Live and let love.
Love and let go.
Go live.”

“It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance.”

Cruel Pink

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

Book Two, Part I “Across the Ring”, Chapter 2 (p. 151)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.”

Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 16, “Sorcery East of Midnight” (p. 169)

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

Book Two, Part II “The Wolf Hunt”, Chapter 2 (p. 178)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me.”

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 9 (p. 78)

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

Book Two, Part III “The Dark City”, Chapter 2 (p. 191)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“‘Not everything that walks is a man,’” said the boulder conversationally, “‘and not everything that lies quiet is a stone,’ as the wolf remarked when the serpent bit him.”

Short fiction, Into Gold (1986)

““Can I appeal?”
“Oh yes.”
“Will it do any good?”
“None whatsoever.””

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 1 (p. 12)

“As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.”

Part 1, Chapter 4 (p. 28)
Don't Bite the Sun (1976)

“What a son I’ve made. The midwives must have turned me in my labor so that I lay on your brain and crushed it.”

Book Two, Part II “The Wolf Hunt”, Chapter 3 (p. 185)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less. The mountain road which led us here was built by a dead people none of us would remember otherwise. What we create is the only part of us which can survive, or has the right to. Man is nothing, except to other men.”

Book 5, “The Serpent Wakes” Chapter 21 (p. 286)
The Storm Lord (1976)

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

The Birthgrave (1975)
Source: Book Two, Part V “Tower-Eshkorek”, Chapter 3 (p. 303)

Tanith Lee book The Castle of Dark

Part 4 “The Witch Hunt” (p. 133)
The Castle of Dark (1978)

“Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.”

“I cried out. I turned the pages, one after the other, in a frenzy. I could not believe what I saw, would not believe it. For the pages of the book were blank.
Oh, yes, there had been writing, this much I could see, but the inks had faded. Now there were only faint smudges and marks here and there on the yellowness. And I could tell nothing from them…
It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth. For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished.”

Book Two, Part II “The Wolf Hunt”, Chapter 1 (p. 166)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“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.”

Book Three, Part II “The Edge of the Sea”, Chapter 2 (p. 357)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“Anyhow, I arrived, and I did feel pretty weird, actually, as if I’d left something behind. My head or something.”

Book Two, Part II “The Wolf Hunt”, Chapter 3 (p. 182)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“Spells are words, and words are merely noises. You are the sorceress, not your instruction. Don’t limit yourself.”

Part 1, Chapter 4 (p. 28)
Don't Bite the Sun (1976)

“Such an accusation is as stupid as it is absurd.”

Source: Short fiction, The Winter Players (1976), Chapter 5, “Black Room, Black Road” (p. 157)

“Now you understand,” Rarm said to me. “It was the last cut against yourself to become convinced of your own hideousness. You held to it and nurtured it, and even identified with the devil goddess of Orash in your determination to be accursed. And it never occurred to you that perhaps you saw a false image under the mountain.”

Source: The Storm Lord (1976), Chapter 11 (p. 160)

“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.”

Book Three, Part III “Inside the Hollow Star”, Chapter 5 (p. 405)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“I would be a drudge now, among the tents, and I would kneel before the warriors, and run from them when they shouted at me. I would be a woman, as women were reckoned in this place, a half-souled, witless animal, created to bear and pleasure men: an afterthought of the god.”

Book Two, Part III “The Dark City”, Chapter 3 (p. 200)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“I see you laugh, and rightly so. What is this silly old fool rambling on about? Good for you. Never respect years, only deeds.”

Book Three, Part I “Snake’s Road”, Chapter 2 (p. 323)
The Birthgrave (1975)

Tanith Lee book Drinking Sapphire Wine

Part 3, Chapter 6 (p. 128)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

“There was no room in him for curiosity; The capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul.”

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

Source: The Storm Lord (1976), Chapter 22 (p. 303)

“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.”

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 1, “Avillis” (p. 8)

Tanith Lee book The Castle of Dark

Source: The Castle of Dark (1978), Chapter 17 “Lilune: The Lion” (p. 161)

“Thinta flew safely, and I realized how much I preferred being with Hergal and feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright. Actually when I’m with Hergal I always realize how much I prefer being with Thinta and not feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright.”

“Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.”

Part 1, Chapter 3 (p. 22)
Don't Bite the Sun (1976)

“What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.”

Book Two, Part IV “War March”, Chapter 7 (p. 268)
The Birthgrave (1975)

““When will they fight?” I asked.
“Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.”
I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.””

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 20 (p. 170)

“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.”

Book Three, Part I “Snake’s Road”, Chapter 3 (p. 333)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“A few old men began to say there had been a winter like this when they were warriors, and that it was a year of catastrophe and disappointment. But old men will ever spin this wheel. The summers were always hotter and the winters colder in the days of their strength, and the air thick with epic drama and portent.”

Book One, Part III “White Lynx”, Chapter 1 (p. 78)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope.”

Book One, Part II “The Warrior”, Chapter 1 (p. 41)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“When you fell in the sea, you should have heard them cheer. I made them rope the yard and fish you up. I said a ducking in water washes the witch-skill out of a woman until next full moon, and it would be bad luck to let you drown. How about that for a clever story? They’d believe anything if you make it sound silly enough.”

Book One, Part III “White Lynx”, Chapter 2 (pp. 93-94)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“Rewa was brave. At least, she was thick-witted enough to be able to ignore personal danger to a great extent.”

Source: Short fiction, The Winter Players (1976), Chapter 3, “Red Ship” (p. 136)

“White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled.”

Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 12, “Sorcery in the Dark” (p. 129)

“I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.”

Book One, Part IV “Ankurum”, Chapter 5 (p. 108)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“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.”

Book Two, Part I “Yellow City”, Chapter 5 (p. 152)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“Woana was the most talented, amazing and prodigious human in the world, and the most beautiful too. For Woana, if she had summoned them, those bright eyes in the sky would have danced down to earth; but naturally Woana was far too sophisticated to stoop to such a thing. Woana was, in fact, unrivalled, peerless. The reason being that Mitz belonged to her, and Mitz’s feline ego would never consider that anyone, but the most sublime, could have acquired her own exceptional self.”

Book One, Part I “The Krarl”, Chapter 4 (p. 31)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

“We should go and ask the princess for help. She seems very nice, and she’s much too beautiful to be unkind.”

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 17 (p. 144)

Tanith Lee book The Dragon Hoard

Source: The Dragon Hoard (1971), Chapter 7 (p. 110)

“Uasti was a good teacher,” he said. “She made you look a little way into yourself, see what you could become.”

“Don’t judge yourself,” he said. “None of us are ever good at it.”

Book Three, Part III “Inside the Hollow Star”, Chapter 5 (p. 402)
The Birthgrave (1975)

““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?””

Book Three, Part III “Inside the Hollow Star”, Chapter 5 (p. 402)
The Birthgrave (1975)

Tanith Lee book The Castle of Dark

Part 4 “The Witch Hunt” (p. 139)
The Castle of Dark (1978)

“They were very careful and kind. So careful and kind it was positively tactless and spiteful.”

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

Part 4, Chapter 1 (p. 114)
Don't Bite the Sun (1976)

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

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 11 (p. 100)

““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.””

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 1 (p. 9; opening line)

“The moon walks east of midnight,
The sun walks west of noon.
And though I love you, sweetheart,
I will not sing your tune.”

Source: Prince on a White Horse (1982), Chapter 4 “The Dragon of Brass” (p. 207)

“I have a plan,” said Xaros, “improbable only in its genius.”

Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 2, “Full Moon” (p. 24; often repeated)