Tanith Lee
author ·
Tanith Lee was a British science fiction and fantasy writer. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. She also wrote a children's picture book, and many poems. She wrote two episodes of the BBC science fiction series Blake's 7.
"When you fell in the sea, you should have heard them cheer. I made them rope the yard and fish you up. I said a ducking in water washes the witch-skill out of a woman until next full moon, and it would be bad luck to let you drown. How about that for a clever story? They’d believe anything if you make it sound silly enough."
"I know the old ways. There’s nothing evil there, only strange, and not even strange when you know it."
"Wealth, or large amounts of possessions seemed to him limiting. They brought their own prison with them. He preferred, since he had once known a kind of prison, to travel free."
"Odd, how different different men’s fears could be."
"“Sometimes, Skorous,” Draco said, “you are a fool.” “Sometimes I am not alone in that.”"
"And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me."
"He had been too near the hard facts of religions as a child to find it soothing."
"Let us prove to the world that superstition is idiocy and all the demons are dust."
"Spells are words, and words are merely noises. You are the sorceress, not your instruction. Don’t limit yourself."
"For an instant a half-formed prayer struggled into Havor’s mouth. But he could not utter it. Not for himself. For him those words were already drowned by the noise the thong-whip had made, or the sounds of children crying out of hunger or the cold or sheer misery in that grey house of orphans in the far North, eight years ago."
"Strange, that when we feel we understand all things, we understand nothing. Strange, that when we feel we understand nothing, we have begun, at last, to understand."
"White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled."
