Night's Master Quotes

“Go nowhere on a horse that fades, for your dreams will betray you.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“and their days make no story for they were good and joyful and without event”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“Flat or round, there has always been hate in the world.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“The child might fear to be born and the mother to give birth, yet neither can choose otherwise when the time is come. Neither have I a choice. This is my only path.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“Go nowhere on a horse that fades.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“Azhrarn, Lord of Terrors, terrified.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“When the night burned its cloak in the sunrise...”
― Tanitha Lee, Night's Master

“And I will love you; for such as I am, I do not give my love lightly, but once given it is sure. Only remember this, if ever you make an enemy of me, your life shall be as dust or sand in the wind. For what a demon loves and loses he will destroy, and my power is the mightiest you are ever likely to know.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“You, too, are a fool, earthborn, to trust in demon-kind and to ride on a mare of smoke and night. What demons love they slay in the end, and the gifts of demons are snares. Go nowhere on a horse that fades, for your dreams will betray you.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“ONE NIGHT, AZHRARN Prince of Demons, one of the Lords of Darkness, took on him, for amusement, the shape of a great black eagle. East and west he flew, beating with his vast wings, north and south, to the four edges of the world, for in those days the earth was flat and floated on the ocean of chaos.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“The year was woven on the loom, finished and folded away upon the pile of other years in the tall chests of Time.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“But be sure, the age of Innocence was ended.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“I do not want the lying kindness and the gifts of men, nor of other than men. I am armed now.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“His recollections were merely of dark dripping underpasses, echoing caverns bursting with his sub-human cries, filthy holes where he had hidden from meaningless terrors.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“At this point in the story, a child interrupted from the crowd, asking fearfully and loudly if the gods were terrible to behold.
The storytellers smiled, and bowed to the philosophers. One of these, a venerable elderly man, spoke gravely to the child. “No, indeed. The gods are beautiful, and just. Those who reverence and obey them need fear nothing from the gods. The gods reward those who adhere to them. Those who stray, they punish. Then they are terrible, terrible in their perfection and magnificence.”
“But,” said the child anxiously, “what do they look like?” The philosopher was done, however, and the storytellers proceeded with their tale. “Hush!” said the child’s nurse sharply. “But,” said the child, “if I cannot tell them from their looks, how am I to know them and beware of offending them?”
Then a voice spoke to the child, a voice which brushed the insides of the child’s ears, wonderfully unexpected, like the sound of the sea inside a shell. “The gods are colorless as crystal for they have no blood in their veins. Neither do they possess breasts or genitals. Their eyes are cold as their country where everything is tinted by frost. But you will probably never meet them; they have no liking for the world.”
“Oh,” said the child, and looked up and saw the pale face of a man bending over it, a face so astonishing it dazzled the eyes of the child like the moon. Then the child, dazzled, blinked, and in the little interval of that blink, the man was gone.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“[...] Sivesh cried one name aloud. It was the name of Azhrarn, and in that name was all the pain and loneliness and despair and accusation that any mortal throat could utter.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“Having told of so much beauty, how is it possible to tell of her? There are no words left on the earth in any tongue that will do. Such words vanished from the world when it shook itself free from the ocean of chaos, in a cataclysm that reshaped it like one of the balls small children throw in the air at play.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“hatred and jealousy must find a tongue; only the creatures which never feel those things have no need to talk.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“(Oscar) Wilde is surely one of the most erotic writers who ever lived.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“No, Lord Prince. She has too long been the property of others. I do not claim her. I bargained with you only to set her free."
"Yet you love her." said Azhrarn, "or else you would not have come."
"Since I encountered her tears set in the collar of silver, I have loved Ferazhin," said Kazir calmly, "and now, sensing her near me, I love her more deeply. But she knows nothing of me.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“Go drown in mud!" shouted back Vayi rudely from within. "Nothing here is for your eyes.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“A woman lay before the exhausted flames of her dying fire, and he could see at once that she, as was the habit of mortals, was dying too. But in her arms she held a new-born child, covered by a shawl. “Why do you weep?” Azhrarn inquired in fascination as he leant at the door, marvelously handsome, with hair that shone like blue-black fire, and clothed in all the magnificence of night. “I weep because my life has been so cruel, and because now I must die,” said the woman. “If your life has been cruel, you should be glad to leave it, therefore dry your tears, which will, in any case, avail you nothing.” The woman’s eyes grew dry indeed, and flashed with anger almost as vividly as the coal-black eyes of the stranger. “You vileness! The gods curse you that you come mocking me in my last moments. All my days have been struggle and torment and pain, but I should perish without a word if it were not for this boy that I have brought into the world only a few hours since. What is to become of my child when I am dead?” “That will die, too, no doubt,” said the Prince, “for which you should rejoice, seeing he will be spared all the agony you tell me of.” At this the mother shut her eyes and her mouth and expired at once, as if she could no longer bear to linger in his company. But as she fell back, her hands left the shawl, and the shawl unfolded from the baby like the petals of a flower.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master