Love Quote by Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee, the British fantasist whose baroque prose conjured jeweled cities, demons, and haunted lovers, treats writing as both sanctuary and abyss. The act is magical because it opens a door to elsewhere, yet that elsewhere is not merely safe or soothing. It is dreadful and exciting at once, a terrain of heightened risk and heightened vitality. Creation becomes a journey into the shadows as much as into delight, the place where fear sharpens into meaning and danger carries seduction. That doubleness powered Lee’s fiction, where beauty and terror are entwined and characters often discover themselves by walking into darkness rather than fleeing it.

Her use of so-called when referring to the real world hints at a lifelong suspicion of what passes for normality. For Lee, imaginative life is not a retreat from truth but a deeper engagement with it. The world on the page can be more exacting, more honest, and ultimately more inhabited than the social scripts outside it. Belonging, for her, arises where language, myth, and desire converge, where invention lets the self expand beyond the masks demanded by everyday life.

This ethos illuminates her oeuvre, from the sumptuous, morally ambiguous realms of Tales from the Flat Earth to her retellings of fairy tales that expose the pulse of eros and dread beneath familiar plots. She wrote with the conviction that fantasy is not an escape hatch but an alchemical crucible. You go elsewhere to confront what reality will not admit, to broaden the range of what a human can feel and face.

There is also a confession of compulsion. Love of writing is not mild affection but a gravitational pull. The page becomes home even when it terrifies. In that paradox lies the creative engine: belonging not to comfort, but to intensity; not to the ordinary world, but to the charged, perilous freedom of imagination.