Tanith Lee quotes

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer. (Tanith Lee)
No one is ever ordinary. View quote
Tanith Lee
I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault. View quote
Tanith Lee
Pirates have always fascinated me. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
Flat or round, there has always been hate in the world. View quote
Tanith Lee
I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world. View quote
Tanith Lee
I began to feel lighthearted. Don't ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe. View quote
Tanith Lee
It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence. View quote
Tanith Lee
If you run away from trouble, it always follows.' Rather my impression, too. Though that never stopped me trying. View quote
Tanith Lee
Can I appeal?” "Oh yes.” "Will it do any good?” "None whatsoever. (Tanith Lee)
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
Resist. Come, you're tough enough, my lady, aren't you, if you beg for death rather than inflict evil? View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. (Tanith Lee)
Anyhow, I arrived, and I did feel pretty weird, actually, as if I'd left something behind. My head or something. View quote
Tanith Lee
Spells are words, and words are merely noises. You are the sorceress, not your instruction. Don't limit yourself. View quote
Tanith Lee
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. View quote
Tanith Lee
Such an accusation is as stupid as it is absurd. View quote
Tanith Lee