Quotes from Tanith Lee

Let the sky weep for me, Doro. Now I can only weep blood.

Mevary's obvious attempt to catch him flabbily and disadvantageously in the nude had failed.

All last night, indeed, Saffiro had been dreaming of Flavian or Mercurio, and of a prolonged and curiously stimulating duel, which neither won, and during which both displayed great skill, while an increasing fascination and respect grew between them, to the point of their exchanging poetic couplets or cunning puns over the snick and glitter of the blades.

To confront the witch and her witchery, was, after all, turning out to be interesting.

His eyes on her across the distance had seen only symbols, not a face or frame.

The inflexion, the pattern of the words, they were both Mercurio's. Romulan recognized it with a sullen shock, a numbed limb jarred. Saffiro recognized it with fury.

Seeking Romulan Montargo here and there, Leopardo had continually not found him.

The servants listened in fascination as Cornelia's conversation grew more and more ribald, less and less shocked at itself. Eventually, roaring drunk as any good madam of the Bhorga, Cornelia had been hoisted up by six male servants and borne, singing her own requiem, to her chamber.

By the Mass, if they dropped her," said Mercurio, "there's a thought. Being made apparently of porcelain, she'd shatter. A hundred shards of white perfection. Scrabble, gentlemen, scrabble. See who'll get what.

The young man in blue who had become his showpiece, a theater for Leopardo's passions, in an irresistible echoing move also set hand to hilt.

Your cousin draws blade as another man draws breath.

Saffiro whitened and the sword began to lift. Leopardo, aware he could kill this one in two heartbeats, without fire, not wanting him, yawned.

The long hennaed brows rose like the wings of angels. His look, even in disguise, was no quintessentially Cyrionesque that Roilant was defeated by it, and grinned.

Leopardo, striving very hard to pick fights with all his companions and unable to do so-for they were canny and fearful, and knew him in a most hazardous mood-as each eluded him grew more prone to aggression.

From what I hear, he is a young man of sparkling if not always kindly wit.

Cyrion in stone was to be a fleeting concept, not a permanent condition.

I do not sing songs. I sing dreams, and they are nothing. And since you'll have me sing nothing, I need not sing at all.

The Tower is haunted. A piece of wood which speaks. And with such a shrewish voice.

She had been impervious, and like all impervious things, it had taken, at the correct moment, only one look, one dream, to break in the bolted door.

She bowed herself almost to the ground before Sarmur's daughter, with the flamboyant courtesy of one who secretly rules the kingdom.

Like adamant she stared down at him, and some were certain they beheld her abhorence of him now, naked as swords in her gaze, as if she might kill him all over again.

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, and with a name it was no better.

The complexity and danger of the enterprise were nevertheless, considered essential to the plan as a whole: To discover what he wished to, by his own and undetectable means, while leaving as much chaos and doubt in his wake as he might.

For this was not the outcry of love, but one at last, and utterly, and forever, cheated.