Oh man, I love Tanith Lee. Highly underrated author.
Yes, she was a great and very prolific author. She even hinted in certain magazine interviews that she had dabbled in the occult and it inspired some of her work.
Would you recommend the book you quoted from (or can you recommend any others of hers)? The only ones of hers I’ve read are Biting the Sun, The Silver Metal Lover, and Metallic Love, although they are three of my most beloved stories.
“Jane, a pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble; a slender, pale, chain of a name – Jane.”
A rose by any other name
Would get the blame
For being what it is –
the colour of a kiss, the shadow of a flame.
A rose may earn another name,
so call it love,
so call it love I will.
And love is like the sea
which changes constantly
and yet is still
the same.
Aaah I love her, her prose is so beautiful, and (despite only having read three of her novels) she has hugely inspired the way I write fiction.
That book I quoted is part of the Birthgrave trilogy. She wrote so many books it’s hard to choose from them all.
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Why the number three? Probably because there are three stages to be completed: the death. pregnancy and childbirth. Just as the moon, which must have three days to reappear. Historically and symbolically, it is always three for something to come back: the disappearance, the construction, the birth. This is the cycle, the circle, the formula to calculate the perimeter (the life) is, let us remember, the diameter multiplied by 3.14 (Pi). Moreover, if we look at our traditional tales, where the action before the final success always occurs three times: the last of the three times is always a little longer because it includes success: life is somehow the famous 0.141592653589793 after three… These stories are a kind of mythical Pi, that we finally “mathematified”, quantified by numbers. That’s why the number Pi was and is so important. It explains the inexplicable, life, eternity, infinity, and at the same time this cycle of rebirth.
— Marie Cachet, The Secret of the She-Bear
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Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
— Robert A. Heinlein
Knowledge is not intelligence. I have heard many men talk, but none who realize that understanding is distinct from all other knowledge.
— Heraclitus
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Immortality is not a gift, immortality is an achievement; and only those that strive mightily shall possess it.
— Edgar Lee Masters
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A ball cannot bounce untill you let it go.
-Belial
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There is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.
— Eric Berne
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Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
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No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.
Epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix.
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But vain the tears for darken’d years
As laughter over wine,
And vain the laughter as the tears,
O brother, mine or thine,
For all that laugh, and all that weep
And all that breathe are one
Slight ripple on the boundless deep
That moves, and all is gone
— Alfred Tennyson
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To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female. Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.
— Tom Robbins
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You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you’ll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn’t. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken.
— Philip Pullman
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Warning
Man, be careful
not to walk small
under the stars.
May your whole body
be filled with
the dim light of the stars!
To have no regrets
when with the last glances
you part with the stars!
In your final hour
instead of dust
pass whole to the stars.
A.B. Simic
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My Cats
I know. I know.
they are limited, have different
needs and
concerns.
but I watch and learn from them.
I like the little they know,
which is so
much.
they complain but never
worry,
they walk with a surprising dignity.
they sleep with a direct simplicity that
humans just can’t
understand.
their eyes are more
beautiful than our eyes.
and they can sleep 20 hours
a day
without
hesitation or
remorse.
when I am feeling
low
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.
I study these
creatures.
they are my
teachers.
— Charles Bukowski
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No more let Life divide
what Death can join together.
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
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