Tanith Lee

A few old men began to say there had been a winter like this when they were warriors, and that it was a year of catastrophe and disappointment. But old men will ever spin this wheel. The summers were always hotter and the winters colder in the days of their strength, and the air thick with epic drama and portent.

I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.

To fall suddenly sick when you have never been ill is a hard lesson. If it teaches anything, it teaches you that you must not trust to the thing you know, that it is better to build on shifting sand than the rock which may confound you on the day it shatters.

This was the custom of the tribes, and perhaps, in the fogs of their pasts, the scheme had had its reasons. Yet like many of their ways, only the peel remained, the fruit was long gone.

The moon walks east of midnight,

The sun walks west of noon.

And though I love you, sweetheart,

I will not sing your tune.

The bird stabs the worm, the big cat breaks the bird’s neck, the man casts his spear into the heart of the cat. That is how the world is. Even the man had better look behind him; the wolf may be near, or another man, or fate, the hungriest hunter of them all.

There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.

Rewa was brave. At least, she was thick-witted enough to be able to ignore personal danger to a great extent.

We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.

The sea was a phenomenon I had never clapped eyes on for myself, yet it seemed, from the tales, a destination ultimate and uncompromising. The ocean’s edge, the brink of the land; the lip of Chaos.

The sacrifice lives, but the sun’s still shining.

There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope.