Tanith Lee: Trending quotes

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

Tanith Lee book East of Midnight

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

“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.”

Tanith Lee book Volkhavaar

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

“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.”

“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)

Tanith Lee book Don't Bite the Sun

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

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

Tanith Lee

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”