Quotes from Tanith Lee

Mothers are notoriously partial. They would put up with almost anything. Such a small number of us would otherwise survive.

Even the rich must feed the demons.

Your leave to sit." "The countryside is as much yours as mine, sir." "Damn you then, I'll sit." "It's hardly needful you should send me to Hell for that. But then, you have another way in mind.

When he had danced from her sight, Electra Chenti raised her own hand, which had struck him, and stretched it. Presently, she put it up to her lips, laid her mouth against it, held it to her.

She did not understand what to do; she did not understand herself. All the amorphous pain that had welled up in her before, all that longing without a name, had now found a name, and with a name it was no better.

He, with his hair like the earliest sunrise, his fair complexion, his eyes gilded by lashes longer than their own, was like a being from another world.

He loves to play, cat with rat.

Oh beautiful flower," she mocked him, "to see you grow and burst your bonds.

She gripped his arm, pressing her claws into the naked flawless skin and the firm muscle beneath.

He stretched his crayoned mouth, and nodded, and there stood all his actors in a line, though somehow it was still hard to count them, still difficult to be sure how many of them there were.

Here she forgot her country, all but a ghost of it, only the voices of her ancestors, her race, reminded her, and sometimes her dreams.

It was, for sure, the fault of those two gallants who had come up onto the balcony. One was an absolute Satan in his mask (though a fine figure on him), the other, unmasked and marvelous as a young knight in a stained glass window, stone-white and apparently dead, yet fit for an empress to lay hands on. Moved herself, Cornelia could see the effect this spectacle would have on the impressionable and sheltered virgin. Beg to Jesus to put such stirrings out of little Iuletta's breast.

Her condition of insoluble despair had finally sought relief in song.

The sun was almost gone, and soon it would be the night. And then night forever. But not quite yet.

Give me poison," Romulan said. "You are poisoned enough," the priest said. "Drink.

Her land was warn and this land was cold, but this cold land became her land, and its ways, her ways, because she could recall no others. Only the pride she kept, the heritage which was somehow part of her bones and could not desert her.

A dream came by. The dream had the actor's face and his voice, but he did not speak to her and his eyes did not answer hers.

Can you raise ghosts with your magic scroll? Mercurio will come and laugh at you.

She felt, with intensity only fifteen could know. And it was a true and dreadful intensity, no less to be credited because one found her wracked in the throes of it.

Love was like a wild beast gnawing her heart and her vitals. She had been too proud and too outcast and too self-sufficient to know it before.

Mercurio watched with an intense solemnity that could only cover amusement.

To breathe was patently an act of will, each time more was taken than was needed, and yet found to be inadequate.

The sadistic, rather predictable game was irresistible to him.

He could not use her or profane her, this mirror image of his life.