Tanith Lee

For, though sometimes worshipping gods, the Yunea did not permit itself to stray too far onto the abstract path of sheer faith. An ambience of security was all the aristocrats required, a guarantee that fate loved them.

Ceedres was her god. To be happy, she must worship him, and let him destroy her, and take pleasure in it.

“I can’t guess,” said Olvia, “why he accepted my invitation. If I had realized he would, I would never have sent it.”

Nothing can be learned without some measure of risk, and, more vital still, of patience.

Self-love is neither fantasy nor vulgar joke. The totality of the “I,” the inbuilt survival and self-protective trait, is one of the most unshakable syndromes known to psycho-science.

In our place, we can hardly go backward, but neither should we ignore the nakedness of humanity before the huge-wheeled vehicle of progress. We have too much to give, and far too much to learn, to throw ourselves away.

But among the aristocrats whose existence could be lengthily prolonged into three or four hundred spans, boredom came to be the killer, a bizarre running down, a sort of decline and decay, nonphysical but fatal.

In the partial silence, the ocean asserted itself, waves hurled loudly against rock, slithering back with smashed spines, then, healed by immersion, hurled forward again.

The harshest lesson of all was that which ran contrary to the teaching of his own personality.

Like many a longed-for gift, it was, in possession, unwelcome.

It was idiotic to be superstitious.

She had no reason not to believe in the impossible. Desperation was always ready to pray for miracles.