Quotes from Tanith Lee

My beauty,' said Althene. 'You must cease running away from yourself. One day you'll catch up. What will happen then?

It is the ability to perform for days or weeks like balanced and cheerful automata, when some substrata, something upon which our codes or our hopes had firmly rested has given way. Men who lose their wives or their God are quite capable of behaving in this manner, for an indefinite season. After which the collapse is brilliant and total.

And as he rested there in silence and she with gentle fingers smoothed his forehead, the strange flat earth went on about its business through the night.

Having told of so much beauty, how is it possible to tell of her? There are no words left on the earth in any tongue that will do. Such words vanished from the world when it shook itself free from the ocean of chaos, in a cataclysm that reshaped it like one of the balls small children throw in the air at play.

Hope is a punishable offence. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.

No one asks a robot what he wants.

Who could say what went on, at sunrise, in the thick woods below the planet-searching dome of the Observatory, which saw only space and stars?

The cord that bound us drew tighter as we moved further from each other. It tautened, ready to recoil, and plunge us home, breast to breast, eye to eye.

Is any world quite sensible?

It was then, so curiously, that Miranda held out her arms...And Rachaela went into the arms of Miranda, and together they wept,...like ancient sisters in a tragedy.

Mirrors taught: Perhaps there were always at least two sorts of reality, what you credited, and what was true.

She was strangely different. Not actually in any way he [her father] might have feared. Rather, she seemed more sure, quieter, more still, more absorbent, more favorably aware of them [her family] than ever in the past.

Down the stairs again leapt Art. She whirled across the lower landing, her head full of barking cannon, towering rigging, the creak of timbers, the voice of her mother, Molly. Before her eyes floated the golden oasts of Amer Rica, Persis, and Zanzibari, dolphins springing like silver bullets from the blue mouths of the waves. 'Her father must be fetched!' shouted Miss Eeble. 'She has gone mad!' 'Sane,' remarked Art. 'Gone sane.

I see that. Where am I?' 'You are quite secure, Rachaela. You have all of us.' Rachaela quailed. 'But you're all mad.' Anna smiled her smile. 'What can I say to that.

Dusk came to the third day and killed it with a blue sword. Always it was the same, and the day, always taken by surprise, never escaped, but bled and swooned and shut its eyes in blackness.

Who does not know?

Romulan dressed his face in its most charming and unpredictable smile, and as the woman rode close enough to see him fully, he turned it on her.

I see the labyrithine trusts would appeal to a scholarly mind.

Iuletta's delicate pallor whitened. Her eyes became the shade of the purple core of a peacock's feather. She was extraordinary, and for an instant, Cornelia fell back from her aghast at this unconscionsciable loveliness.

Confound you, what are you? A daisy crossed with a razor-some kind of hybrid of Heaven and the Pit?

Cyrion, one has to suppose, is one who naturally attracts bizarre, uncanny events, as some persons attract misfortune.

I have been clinging to a corpse, thinking I should lose it. Now it seems I am condemned not to. How ungrateful.

Barbayat, the Grey Lady lived on the mountain's side, though not consistently, and it was well known that some people who went looking for her did not find her, while others who would rather have kept out of her way, stumbled on her door by accident.

Mercurio bowed, a touch too courteously, an edge Chenti, so quick to speak of swords, quite missed.