Quotes from Tanith Lee

If you are a man, you will do it." "Oh no, lady. Only if I am your notion of a man.

An admirer of female beauty, if not essentially snared by it, he feasted briefly on two smouldering blue coals of eyes, fringed by coal-black lashes. Romulan's eyes, for that matter, and also for that matter, fixed upon Romulan.

Many in Jebba who had fallen foul of Hasmun had had cause to dread that reliable return, darkness which brought jeweled stares and jeweled pins and pain jeweled with tears and sweat.

What I remember is impossible. Against the law of God.' 'Why should you suppose that? You must permit God to grasp His own law rather better than fallible man, who has perhaps misunderstood.

Sana Vera!" she murmured as he came forward, "but he's beautiful. More beautiful than you, you wretch." "So he is, and restrain your paws from him. His noble father wishes him kept virgin till the marriage night.

Tanaquil gently toed the peeve. I'll unfasten the window. Jump out to the lower roof and run. Stay and bite, said the peeve.

Cyrion, escaped prey, stood immobile, the sword free of its sheath and poised, almost delicately, in his right hand. His face betrayed only the mildest surprise at what was before him, a being surely minted in hell.

Is it you? Yes.

To Mareme, he nodded politely. At Cyrion he smiled with love.

The dark mouthed Cyrion. It licked him, rolled him around on its tongue. The lit taper was just a garnish to its palate, it liked the light with Cyrion, as a man might like salt with his meat.

Barely dampered by virginity or unpractice, their bodies seemed to know each other as their souls had seemed to.

Instruments of magecraft were everywhere apparent, polished skulls, star charts, a long eastern window from which personally to observe the heavens, a crystal of clairvoyance minted in brass.

silence finding how to make a sound.

On the grassy slope abot the inn, where the myrtles grew, Flavian Estemba sat like a piece of classic statuary, watching the last lights fade away from the apertures of the building below.

Have what you want, king, she sang at him. And then she threw something right at him.

To snuff a candle is pleasing. But to finish you, my dear, is to blot out a sun. How could I resist it?

She talks to demons. Yes, to one: herself.

You could not resist the bait, this reputation of mine. It inflamed your vanity, Cyrion. As you reputation inflames mine. Jealousy. You must destroy the wicked Hasmun and his wax, and rule alone the cities of the coast. Eh, my honey? And I must and will destroy Cyrion.

Cornelia tottered. Mercurio supported her. With pleasure in the acting, she courteously did not throw her weight upon him, he courteously pretended she was weightless. They were confederates.

Cornelia sank in romance until it reached her chin. All but her sense was submerged.

Shaina, said the dawn under the door, wake up! Here comes Young Ash with beer in his belly as high as his eyes and here comes the day walking over the mountain, the day when the witch buys your maiden's blood with her spell.

If they wed this evening, we can let them have at least one night to imagine themselves in Paradise, before the walls of Montargo and Chenti come smashing down round their poor little ears and they know themselves in Hell instead.

Electra Chenti in crimson almost black, a diadem of Grechian influence in her uncombed hair from which unravelled a veil like a golden spider's web, studied her narrow hands and the thirteen rings that gripped her fingers. She cared little for any of them. There was only one she hated-on the marriage finger of her left hand. The scalding room had not tinted her white cheeks at all. Yet she had warned a fraction. To a perverse, bitter joy that her daughter, too, must suffer marriage.

The boy flushed. The voice had recently broken to a true silver tenor, cunning accessory to Mercurio's darker range. He was, besides, in love with Mercurio. Half Verensa had been would be. Filled with terror and joy, the boy waited trembling.