Sung in Shadow Quotes

“Damn this, damn that. So much profligate damning. Hell will be busy.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Now let’s be going before Susina finishes biting the cash, and comes to ravish you.”

“You paid her. I’m in your debt-“

“Yes, yes, and the sun is a vast light, and the world has four corners, and we are all in Lucifer’s net. Out of the trap, mouse. The cheese is eaten.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Explicit sin was sweeter than mere carnality.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“When will you wed, Mercurio?”

“Oh, I’d wed Mercurio tomorrow, but he will not have me.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“All last night, indeed, Saffiro had been dreaming of Flavian or Mercurio, and of a prolonged and curiously stimulating duel, which neither won, and during which both displayed great skill, while an increasing fascination and respect grew between them, to the point of their exchanging poetic couplets or cunning puns over the snick and glitter of the blades.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“It came to him to wonder, though only for a second, why the mercurial Mercurio kept about him such a symbol of order and changeless.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Dear Heaven,” said Mercurio, leaning out, “a lunatic is in the garden.”

“A lunatic is also in the house,” Romulan called back at the same quiet carrying pitch. “Shall we compare delusions?”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Mercurio’s profound graveness tottered on the brink of extreme uncontrolled hilarity.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Mercurio,” Saffiro snarled, “do not, I beg you, mock me.”

“Do not, I beg you, beg me not. I mock everyone. Mock, mock, mock. An unhappy trait. Either you must endure it, or you must go home.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“I do not sing songs. I sing dreams, and they are nothing. And since you’ll have me sing nothing, I need not sing at all.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“The inflexion, the pattern of the words, they were both Mercurio’s. Romulan recognized it with a sullen shock, a numbed limb jarred. Saffiro recognized it with fury.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Let the sky weep for me, Doro. Now I can only weep blood.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“In his handsomeness, the long black hair on his shoulders, his clothes fashionable, everything about him hinting at a paragon, he distressed Doro, for he was beyond him. In rank, in person, in all things. Such a being was not to be managed. Particularly now it had assumed this ghastly self-defeating strength.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Where is my poppy, my catling? Where is my young lady?”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Cold enough to burn, she was yet his dutiful wife.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“With one she loved she would be fire and flower and flood. But with any other, worthless, cold, and useless.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Susina had made her own way. Judging by the courtyard and the house and the wine, a primrose path indeed. And if Hellfire was at the end of it, then so it was for many others.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Physical glamour she admired, and an open purse likewise.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“To her, Iuletta was like a star, rarefied and alien, the denizen of another world, foreign as the pretty boy from Inde.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“When Electra stood before her, their likeness and their unlikeness, both, were disconcerting. The black hair, the slender shapely form. Yet hyacinth hair in one, dragon’s blood in the other, and the one figure like a flower stem and the other figure like a bone. Their faces were unmatched. The younger, peerlessly beautiful, lowered, unreadable. The older face like a carving, with a snake behind it.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“The grief would now take the world from him and deliver him to darkness, and he was glad of it.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Romulan was the child of his body, the last emblem of love which was left.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Contrary to your view of me, I’m not a man who hands over his only son to the rabble.”

“Oh,” Romulan said beautifully, “then in one instance at least, Father, you are unlike God.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Dear me,” Romulan said, “worst of all my execrable failings, to bring you, sir, to such a display.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“To breathe was patently an act of will, each time more was taken than was needed, and yet found to be inadequate.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Can you raise ghosts with your magic scroll? Mercurio will come and laugh at you.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Give me poison,” Romulan said.

“You are poisoned enough,” the priest said. “Drink.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Like the child she was, fallen hard as she had, she was as yet too stunned to lament.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“Blood and roses, the sunlight came in through the panes, touching her face with a color it did not have.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow

“For this was not the outcry of love, but one at last, and utterly, and forever, cheated.”
― Tanith Lee, Sung in Shadow