Tanith Lee cytaty

„Świat ludzi był dla nich jak płonący sen, bez znaczenia i następstw, był igrzyskiem ich czarów i niegodziwości.”

„Tylko sukces może dać ci wolność.”

„Jeśli już mam żyć w niewoli, będę nosić głowę wyżej niż córka księcia.”

„Dobrze ułożona dama nigdy z niczego nie spada.”

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

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

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

“Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.”

“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.”

“It's lovely. I hate it.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”