Life & Mortality Quote by Tanith Lee

Character is Tanith Lee's true occult technology: the spell that makes everything else believable. In a single breath she collapses the distance between the human and the supposedly inhuman, insisting that the only portal worth building is empathy. "People are always the start for me" reads like a craft note, but it's also a manifesto against the genre habit of treating monsters and deities as costume jewelry. Lee is saying: if you want the supernatural to land, you don't begin with lore; you begin with motive.

The list that follows is doing sly rhetorical work. Animals, gods, immortals, the dead: a staircase of otherness, each rung inviting the reader to feel the thrill of difference. Then she undercuts that thrill with a demystifying turn: "these are all people to me". Not "human", not "relatable", but "people" - a broader category that makes room for alien moral logics without turning them into metaphors with legs. It's an argument for interiority over taxonomy.

Context matters: Lee wrote in the wake of mid-century fantasy and science fiction that often prized world-building as engineering. Her work, steeped in myth, Gothic sensuality, and fairy-tale menace, tends to treat the fantastic less as an escape hatch than as a pressure cooker for desire, cruelty, faith, and hunger. The subtext is quietly defiant: so-called "genre" isn't a lesser literature; it's a different stage where the same old human dramas can wear sharper masks. By calling gods and the dead "people", Lee doesn't tame them. She makes them responsible.