Top 100 Tanith Lee Quotes
#1. If you run away from trouble, it always follows.'
Rather my impression, too. Though that never stopped me trying.
Tanith Lee
#2. I felt angry and silly in that feather-itch dress. I felt alone. But one always is, I suppose.
Tanith Lee
#3. Men could not have too much. Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. The fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor and as Zhirem's cup was sure, so was his joylessness ... to die is a fear, but to live is a fear, also.
Tanith Lee
#4. Israbel smiled once more. It was difficult to take your gaze away from her mouth - unless you looked into her eyes; and then you could only look at those ... ("Israbel")
Tanith Lee
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine
Tanith Lee
#8. Azhrarn the Beautiful," said Chuz lovingly, "it is your beautiful madness I have come to see.
Tanith Lee
#9. I do not think I was afraid. There must be substance to breed fear, and I was hollow.
Tanith Lee
#10. I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.
Tanith Lee
#11. 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.
Tanith Lee
#12. Roilant caught himself, with exasperation, slipping into vacuous philosophy, a sure sign his opinion of life was at its very lowest.
Tanith Lee
#13. 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
#14. The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.
Tanith Lee
#15. I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.
Tanith Lee
#16. Living With The Dead Molly Brown I
Tanith Lee
#17. Don't ever," he said, "be afraid of me."
But I was. He'd driven a silver nail through my heart.
Tanith Lee
#18. The dictate of the light says: Know yourself and what you are. The dark replies, By all means, but then become afraid.
Tanith Lee
#19. As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.
Tanith Lee
#20. I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.
Tanith Lee
#21. Mirrors taught: Perhaps there were always at least two sorts of reality, what you credited, and what was true.
Tanith Lee
#22. Im a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction.
Tanith Lee
#23. 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
#24. Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. The fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor.
Tanith Lee
#25. No one more cynical than an idealist.
Tanith Lee
#27. Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
Tanith Lee
#28. The guilty are always the most prone to establish complementary guilt, and the most unforgiving thereafter.
Tanith Lee
#29. Goddess," he said, "I would strongly advise you to continue this journey as you were - in your carriage." "Vazkor," I said, "I would strongly advise you not to advise me.
Tanith Lee
#30. It gets cold in the desert at night, particularly up in the mountains; the stars hammer on the rock and strike frost.
Tanith Lee
#31. Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
Tanith Lee
#32. She braced herself for the pain of the perfect horn breaking her heart.
Tanith Lee
#33. Flat or round, there has always been hate in the world.
Tanith Lee
#34. The kind of teacher who never learned anything herself. Or taught anything, except sarcasm or fear.
Tanith Lee
#35. 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
#36. We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests.
Tanith Lee
#37. He may harp in the Dark One's Hall and take no harm, who is a true harper.
Tanith Lee
#38. I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.
Tanith Lee
#39. Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.
Tanith Lee
#40. When the night burned its cloak in the sunrise ...
Tanith Lee
#41. 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
#42. Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable.
Tanith Lee
#43. I haven't changed. Something's happened to me, that's all.
Tanith Lee
#44. And their days make no story for they were good and joyful and without event
Tanith Lee
#45. Would you like an interview for the drama, too?"
"I can't act."
"Everyone can act. We spend our lives acting.
Tanith Lee
#47. You should visit before you pass judgement on a place.
Tanith Lee
#48. Live and let love.
Love and let go.
Go live.
Tanith Lee
#49. She was what an aristocrat should be, porcelain and silk, unreachable, gracious, untainted by the dust of all this common death.
Tanith Lee
#50. 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
#51. I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world.
Tanith Lee
#52. Louisa beheld the grounds and house with the calm pleasure of one who has seen nothing, been nowhere, expects everything, and has little imagination.
Tanith Lee
#54. Condemned and executioner are not coupled in a primitive rite.
Tanith Lee
#55. She could not mourn. She could no longer weep grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening.
Tanith Lee
#56. I loved him, just for a minute. I loved him and I grieved for him and my pity was part of the beauty, before the shame began.
Tanith Lee
#57. I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.
Tanith Lee
#58. I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.
Tanith Lee
#59. I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!
Tanith Lee
#60. I tend not to analyse my work, though I'm frequently intrigued when other people take time to do so.
Tanith Lee
#62. Often misunderstood, Dionysus is far more than a wine deity. He is the Breaker of Chains, who rescues not only the flesh but the heart and spirit from too much of worldly regulations and duties. He is a god of joy and freedom. Any uncultivated, tangled, and primal woodland is very much his domain.
Tanith Lee
#63. Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.
Tanith Lee
#64. The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.
Tanith Lee
#65. Madness. I did not get myself born to die. I have better things to do.
Tanith Lee
#66. 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.
Tanith Lee
#67. I will pay you in trouble and terror.
Tanith Lee
#68. The humble were the elect of God. Did not the priests teach so, in their gemmed, kingly robes, from their towering pulpits?
Tanith Lee
#69. I will draw you back to me. You shall see. By a chain of stars.
Tanith Lee
#70. Standing by the frozen glass, he stared down at the icy, barely lit streets running towards the river Seine, the bell-clanging local church, then to the sky like black lead. ("Israbel")
Tanith Lee
#71. The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it.
Tanith Lee
#72. It was so useful to lie with the truth.
Tanith Lee
#73. Pale beauty stands aghast," he said, "at the vulgar ugliness of men.
Tanith Lee
#74. 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
#75. Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote.
Tanith Lee
#76. Tanaquil gently toed the peeve. "I'll unfasten the window. Jump out to the lower roof and run."
"Stay and bite," said the peeve.
Tanith Lee
#77. 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
#78. I came up with a parallel Venice called Venus. set in a parallel Venice about 1701.
Tanith Lee
#79. I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.
Tanith Lee
#80. When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it.
Tanith Lee
#81. Some writers, of course, simply write, as they feel they are driven to do, by outer/inner inspirations. If, after the work is written and, hopefully, published, others respond
that is the Champagne. But we, or some of us, don't write for the Champagne. We write because we write.
Tanith Lee
#82. When I started as a writer, I knew nothing about publishing-nothing about anything!
Tanith Lee
#83. Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.
Tanith Lee
#84. People are always the start for me ... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead ... these are all people to me.
Tanith Lee
#85. The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.
Tanith Lee
#86. It was usual to be obedient to authority, to obey a legal letter. But Rachaela left her bills
unpaid until the threats began. She ignored the money-envelopes stuck through the door for starving
children and the sick.
Tanith Lee
#87. 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
#88. I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?
Tanith Lee
#89. Azhrarn, Lord of Terrors, terrified.
Tanith Lee
#90. Pirates have always fascinated me.
Tanith Lee
#91. I hardly ever work from a synopsis
I find they act like chains.
Tanith Lee
#93. I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.
Tanith Lee
#94. Hatred and jealousy must find a tongue; only the creatures which never feel those things have no need to talk.
Tanith Lee
#95. Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.
Tanith Lee
#96. 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.
Tanith Lee
#98. I simply write what I want, wish, long to write ... The state of human life and the god or demon within. The constant internal war that being alive can conjure.
Tanith Lee
#99. The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.
Tanith Lee
#100. 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
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