Top 120 Tanith Lee Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “But be sure, the age of Innocence was ended.”

— Tanith Lee

102. “You, too, are a fool, earthborn, to trust in demon-kind and to ride on a mare of smoke and night. What demons love they slay in the end, and the gifts of demons are snares. Go nowhere on a horse that fades, for your dreams will betray you.”

— Tanith Lee

103. “Jane,” he said. “Jane, a pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender, pale chain of a name.”

— Tanith Lee

104. “This was where his happiness lay, to sit in the great library and to read all things.”

— Tanith Lee

105. “Their life was aimless, that was, literally without aims. This was what living was about, they said. Not to join in, become imprisoned by rules and inhibitions. One should simply exist.”

— Tanith Lee

106. “In the late summer afternoon, the river lay thin and shallow among its smooth stones.”

— Tanith Lee

107. “Death is God,” I said. “Life is Man. The day we are born begins our love affair with death.”

— Tanith Lee

108. “I wished I could leave me alone too.”

— Tanith Lee

109. “So Coira grew now, with two distinct sides. The silent, loveless, light side, where everything was clear and plain and harsh. And the shadow side, softer and secretive, kind in its own way, philosophical, and convinced of spirit.”

— Tanith Lee

110. “As they looked at each other, the woman and her daughter, they were not privy to what else the elderly lady had bequeathed. The pretty little bow-tied presents soon to be delivered to all the remaining assistants in the shop. Which each contained the turds of dogs and other, even more prolific, animals.”

— Tanith Lee

111. “The child might fear to be born and the mother to give birth, yet neither can choose otherwise when the time is come. Neither have I a choice. This is my only path.”

— Tanith Lee

112. “Is any world quite sensible?”

— Tanith Lee

113. “I came from heaven with a gift. I came from hell with something lost.”

— Tanith Lee

114. “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.”

— Tanith Lee

115. “They’re letting off about two thousand fireworks.”

— Tanith Lee

116. “It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth. For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished.”

— Tanith Lee

117. “The smile was not for Malach. It was a twisting up of elderly male lips that showed stained, smoker’s, bad false teeth bathed in Steradent once every seven or eight days. The eyes were shiny with venom.”

— Tanith Lee

118. “I do not want the lying kindness and the gifts of men, nor of other than men. I am armed now.”

— Tanith Lee

119. “What is reality after all,” he said. “Did we not invent all this, are we not God, any and all of us?” He spread his own elegant hand on the table. “I could pass my hand through the wood as if through water. Any man, any woman, could do it. No chains, no bindings. It’s a world of chaos restrained solely by the human mind, which then, afraid of itself, steps back and says, see this colossal machine over which I have no power at all.”

— Tanith Lee

120. “To satisfy the curious is not our fate. Our fate is darker and more savage. We await a savior. We await him in bondage.”

— Tanith Lee

121. “But what,” demanded the jawbones, with sinister insistency, “is love?”

— Tanith Lee

122. “Yes, he was very dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Vazkor, for his weapon was honesty.”

— Tanith Lee

123. “Conraj starts to talk to the Cat, which sometimes purrs, like a polite acquaintance whose mind is on other things.”

— Tanith Lee

124. “I felt angry and silly in that feather-itch dress. I felt alone. But one always is, I suppose.”

— Tanith Lee

125. “Almost asphyxiated, I kneeled in the broken grave, retching and coughing and choking for air: all the horrors of birth.”

— Tanith Lee

126. “No one asks a robot what he wants.”

— Tanith Lee

127. “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.”

— Tanith Lee

128. “He looked up then, and into my eyes. His own were very black, sensuous, carnal, earthbound eyes, full of orthodox sins, and extremely young in a sense that had nothing to do with physical age, but with race, I suppose, the youngness of ancient things, like Pan himself, quite possibly.”

— Tanith Lee

129. “Thinta flew safely, and I realized how much I preferred being with Hergal and feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright. Actually when I’m with Hergal I always realize how I prefer being with Thinta and not feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright.”

— Tanith Lee

130. “Times change, men change, the rabble –never. The rabble is an animal, a corporate body made up of many atoms of which each of us, however delicate or refined of soul, is capable of becoming part. It is a mindless beast, needing and wanting only hot blood to feed on and the warmth of itself for a home.”

— Tanith Lee

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

— Tanith Lee

132. “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?”

— Tanith Lee

133. “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.”

— Tanith Lee

134. “Assule went on and on about the civilization that had been here first. It could have been very interesting if he hadn’t managed to make it so boring. I don’t know how he did it, actually. Some latent talent for sending everyone droad, I suppose.”

— Tanith Lee

135. “Conspiracy was all around, wearing a million masks.”

— Tanith Lee

136. “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.”

— Tanith Lee

137. “Who does not know?”

— Tanith Lee

138. “Where were you and your God when he had me down in the snow-what return must I give you for that?”

— Tanith Lee

139. “Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.”

— Tanith Lee