Quotes from Tanith Lee

Living With The Dead Molly Brown I

His voice was as beautiful as the rest of him, and the scout listened with offended amazement.

Physical glamour she admired, and an open purse likewise.

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. During

Damn this, damn that. So much profligate damning. Hell will be busy.

Susina had made her own way. Judging by the courtyard and the house and the wine, a primrose path indeed. And if Hellfire was at the end of it, then so it was for many others.

hatred and jealousy must find a tongue; only the creatures which never feel those things have no need to talk.

Mercurio was at times given to the darkest of dark reveries, cloaking them, masking them even from himself, with songs and tricks, or displays of mocking and mostly controlled lunacy.

I thought I wronged you in that garden, spoke out of turn. I came to beg your pardon, but you make very difficult for me.

With one she loved she would be fire and flower and flood. But with any other, worthless, cold, and useless.

It seemed that across some thirty paces of mosaic, candle wax and human forms, Leopardo had singled him out. The observation was not actually a threat, more a calculation. Romulan, sensing himself weighed, would neither glance away nor move. At risk of dislocation of the neck, he gave Leopardo back watch for watch. The tableau was ended suddenly by a blast of tenor trumpets from the head of the banner-draped stairway.

Cold enough to burn, she was yet his dutiful wife.

Where is my poppy, my catling? Where is my young lady?

You can smoulder in your own syrup from bow till Doomsday, you'll get nothing more from me.

In his handsomeness, the long black hair on his shoulders, his clothes fashionable, everything about him hinting at a paragon, he distressed Doro, for he was beyond him. In rank, in person, in all things. Such a being was not to be managed. Particularly now it had assumed this ghastly self-defeating strength.

Mercurio began to laugh. It was not the usual musical and dangerous laughter. He coughed and cawed and rolled on the ground, bent double as in pain-he might have been weeping. And somewhere in his soul, possibly he was.

It was apparent the mistress of the house was here in the person of the girl with the white hands. And it seemed she possessed authority, for one unruly youth had fled, the other two lay matronless, as if in abject fear, before her. When she spoke again, her young voice was like a thin knife.

Mother," said Shaina, "you told me I would come to you, and presumably you saw an advantage for yourself in so doing or you would not have troubled. Now, why are you trying to put cold in my heart and water in my bones?" "Because," said Barbayat, turning all the way around now towards Shaina, "it will only make you want him more when I tell you how dangerous it is to want, and how unlikely it is that you will succeed in obtaining more than your death.

She did not know quite yet how she had come to rely, to feed upon this anger, her only appetite.

He suffered no regret, no horror, and yet he suffered something, some incoherent abstract crawling of the flesh and shuddering of the intellect. As if the woman had begun to devour him alive. Or as if he himself, discovering in himself some hidden vault, had opened the door and, let forth monsters.

It seemed the betrothed virgin was coming in the person of the eternally young empress of fairyland-her entrance being thus described by poets.

It would seem it was one thing to be murdered, another to be humiliated.

A fish am I," cried Saffiro, "the earth is my ocean.

Leopardo Chenti was drinking from a crystalc up and had turned from him, and so Romulan glanced at Mercurio. That face had grown ominously demure.