Tanith Lee

In the tales of many lands, the prophet goes forth into the wilderness, the waste of sand or snow, or aloft on the barren black mountain, and when he returns to the people his eyes are great and luminous, his face is altered; he tells them he has seen God. I will suppose that God, if He is anywhere, is to be found in men, the nugget of gold buried inside the mud. I will suppose, too, that the wilderness washes off for a moment, or forever, the mud and the clay. Perhaps, then, the returning prophet should not say, “I have seen God”; but rather, “I have seen myself.”

There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.

Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, a destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth, and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.

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 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.

Somewhere in me was a rod of steel to which I clung. I’d had a vision, as good as any vision given to any poet, sage, or prophet in the past. I wasn’t elated, I wasn’t confident even, but somehow, I knew, and with the end of doubt had come the death of despair.

There was no room in him for curiosity; The capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul.

This sight was terrible, more terrible than words convey, for words are cowards as men are, and hide things as men do.