Life & Wisdom Quote by Tanith Lee

Curiosity, for Tanith Lee, isn’t a polite posture; it’s a kind of predation with a velvet glove. “When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it” turns wonder into method: fascination is the spark, play is the engine. The line is disarmingly casual, but it quietly declares an aesthetic ethic. Lee’s imagination doesn’t worship its subjects from a distance. It handles them, rearranges them, tests their edges. “Play” suggests pleasure and freedom, yet it also carries the implication of power: the player sets the rules, the toy is transformed.

That subtext maps neatly onto Lee’s career-long practice of taking inherited material - fairy tales, gothic tropes, myth, gender archetypes - and worrying it like a loose thread until it becomes something stranger and sharper. She was famous for writing in modes often dismissed as “genre,” then using those modes as cover for moral ambiguity, erotic charge, and unsettling beauty. In that context, “play” isn’t frivolous; it’s how you smuggle risk into familiar shapes. The best of Lee’s work feels like it’s enjoying itself while it destabilizes you.

There’s also a sly resistance here to the sanctimony that can surround art. Fascination, she implies, is enough. You don’t need permission, a manifesto, or a solemn justification to explore. You just need the nerve to treat your obsession as material, not as an altar. The sentence reads like an artist admitting her trick: enchantment is real, but it’s also usable.