Quotes from Tanith Lee

Now let's be going before Susina finishes biting the cash, and comes to ravish you." "You paid her. I'm in your debt-" "Yes, yes, and the sun is a vast light, and the world has four corners, and we are all in Lucifer's net. Out of the trap, mouse. The cheese is eaten.

Mercurio," Saffiro snarled, "do not, I beg you, mock me." "Do not, I beg you, beg me not. I mock everyone. Mock, mock, mock. An unhappy trait. Either you must endure it, or you must go home.

At fifteen, she had assumed all the frightful responsibility of love; at fifteen she had grown old.

My felicitations," he said himself aloud, and in Mercurio's tones. "You have got away.

He continued to stand, as if in thought or vanity, before the arresting reflection of himself. But he had grown, unaccountably pale.

He studied Cyrion's vacant face, its hateful glamour like a mask, the searching, hopeless eyes.

Dear me," Romulan said, "worst of all my execrable failings, to bring you, sir, to such a display.

Do you feel the soul sucked from you, most elegant swordsman?

Mercurio, arguing for the discussion's sake, questioning nothing, believing very little, mesmerizing the guardsman as a matter of course, smiled gravely at him.

What gives you to suppose I have a soul?

Under the ruthless cold of the gathering stars, Cyrion walked away.

The wealth of sorcerous knowledge I can import to the world, compared to your own transient beauty and skill, should recompense.

Contrary to your view of me, I'm not a man who hands over his only son to the rabble." "Oh," Romulan said beautifully, "then in one instance at least, Father, you are unlike God.

He was irritated that a young man of such singular appearance should not have accepted death nobly, or least resignedly.

Mercurio's profound graveness tottered on the brink of extreme uncontrolled hilarity.

Romulan was the child of his body, the last emblem of love which was left.

On the back stair, poised and frankly amused, was a young gallant of medium height, sturdily built and fashionably clad, vividly handsome and girded with a sword. The sword, however, was sheathed in white vellum, the left hand was naked of rings, and the shoulder-length hair was the color of midnight. One step farther up stood a slender page-boy, with a tiger lily and a hyacinth tucked behind one translucent ear.

The grief would now take the world from him and deliver him to darkness, and he was glad of it.

The question was now blatant and astonishingly unanswerable. Had they been a boy and a gentleman in the roles of a girl and lady in the roles of a boy and a gentleman? Which? Either? Both?

When Electra stood before her, their likeness and their unlikeness, both, were disconcerting. The black hair, the slender shapely form. Yet hyacinth hair in one, dragon's blood in the other, and the one figure like a flower stem and the other figure like a bone. Their faces were unmatched. The younger, peerlessly beautiful, lowered, unreadable. The older face like a carving, with a snake behind it.

The party, having run out of fables, or the wish to deal in them, drifted apart apart with moist-eyed regrets.

Romulan, leaning his arms on the rail, stared down into the stagnant water far below, seeing his own miniaturized countenance, hypnotized by it.

At midday, beaten almost flat by the hammer of the sun, the desert lay in the perfect imitation of one near death. A deception. Life lurked and thrived in its own way just beneath the skin of the desert. Husks, buried shards, last treasures, veins of water, and magic. While at dusk, the dying thing would rise and shake itself, and stretch to receive the cold balm of the stars.

I never saw a girl so beautiful." "Nor I. And for looks could be your sister. Much on that.