Top 120 Tanith Lee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one’s existence.”

— Tanith Lee

2. “A rose by any other name Would get the blame For being what it is – The colour of a kiss, The shadow of a flame. A rose may earn another name, So call it love; So call it love I will, And love is like the sea, Which changes constantly, And yet is still The same.”

— Tanith Lee

3. “It gets cold in the desert at night, particularly up in the mountains; the stars hammer on the rock and strike frost.”

— Tanith Lee

4. “No one is ever ordinary.”

— Tanith Lee

5. “I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behavior can distress you, even when it’s unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.”

— Tanith Lee

6. “What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.”

— Tanith Lee

7. “I will draw you back to me. You shall see. By a chain of stars.”

— Tanith Lee

8. “We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests.”

— Tanith Lee

9. “We all have our dreams. May we find them, and God have mercy on us when we do.”

— Tanith Lee

10. “No one more cynical than an idealist.”

— Tanith Lee

11. “World’s flying like birds; my car’s in flight. The city lights are spattered on my windshield like the fragments of the night. And I’m in flight. The sky’s a wheel, a merry-go-round of wings and snow and steel, and fire. We’ll tread the sky, we’ll ride the scarlet horses.”

— Tanith Lee

12. “Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine.”

— Tanith Lee

13. “The dictate of the light says: Know yourself and what you are. The dark replies, By all means, but then become afraid.”

— Tanith Lee

14. “Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God.”

— Tanith Lee

15. “She looked, and a scarlet butterfly flew away from her, away down the length of the tower, and then another, another, an unraveling scarf of butterflies like winged blood.”

— Tanith Lee

16. “We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that’s where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.”

— Tanith Lee

17. “Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told – on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others – there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change – passing on the fire like a torch – forever and forever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all.”

— Tanith Lee

18. “Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.”

— Tanith Lee

19. “The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.”

— Tanith Lee

20. “The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that is cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.”

— Tanith Lee

21. “Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.”

— Tanith Lee

22. “I’m not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I’m old, perhaps.”

— Tanith Lee

23. “There was no violence, no speed. It moved to the rhythm of an elder dance, putting all the rituals of the world to shame. Black, silver, gold and moon-opal, night and sea, fire, earth, air and water.”

— Tanith Lee

24. “Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable.”

— Tanith Lee

25. “Go nowhere on a horse that fades, for your dreams will betray you.”

— Tanith Lee

26. “Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.”

— Tanith Lee

27. “Flat or round, there has always been hate in the world.”

— Tanith Lee

28. “I haven’t changed. Something’s happened to me, that’s all.”

— Tanith Lee

29. “I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else. I will admit to a pleasure and sense of hope in what I see as the basic teachings of Christ, stripped of the nonsense that has sometimes been accumulated about them and the embarrassing misunderstanding.”

— Tanith Lee

30. “Fleur de feu. Oh flower of fire. That fire is not hate or fear, which makes flowers come, not terror or anger or lust, it is love that is the fire of the Bite-Me-Not, love which cannot abandon, love which cannot harm. Love which never dies.”

— Tanith Lee

31. “The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.”

— Tanith Lee

32. “It was the forest’s fault. Those two handsome woodcutters. An evil place, the forest, everyone knew it, full of temptations and imps...”

— Tanith Lee

33. “The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it.”

— Tanith Lee

34. “I began to feel lighthearted. Don’t ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe.”

— Tanith Lee

35. “If you run away from trouble, it always follows.”

— Tanith Lee

36. “Condemned and executioner are not coupled in a primitive rite.”

— Tanith Lee

37. “If they had said my writing wasn’t good enough, fair enough, that’s an opinion. But to say it’s too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.”

— Tanith Lee

38. “Azhrarn the Beautiful,” said Chuz lovingly, “it is your beautiful madness I have come to see.”

— Tanith Lee

39. “Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.”

— Tanith Lee

40. “Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and nonfiction. And even there, who can be sure?”

— Tanith Lee

41. “I was born in North London in 1947. I didn’t learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing.”

— Tanith Lee

42. “How massively the mountains stand, while low to the ground the sand blows. The sand blows on and on. And then there are no mountains, none at all, the sand has kissed and whispered them away. And still, the sand blows on.”

— Tanith Lee

43. “Im a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction.”

— Tanith Lee

44. “I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I’d written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.”

— Tanith Lee

45. “In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.”

— Tanith Lee

46. “At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.”

— Tanith Lee

47. “She has a lot of opinions, which is restful, as that way I don’t have to have many of my own.”

— Tanith Lee

48. “It’s very selfish when I write. I’m not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I’m not even really aware of writing for myself.”

— Tanith Lee

49. “Robespierre, crippled and blind, has yet to be healed to the knowledge that service – his desire – is a deed of savage-speaking gentleness, not soft-spoken savagery.”

— Tanith Lee

50. “And I will love you; for such as I am, I do not give my love lightly, but once given it is sure. Only remember this, if ever you make an enemy of me, your life shall be as dust or sand in the wind. For what a demon loves and loses he will destroy, and my power is the mightiest you are ever likely to know.”

— Tanith Lee