Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Dogs own space and cats own time.

She liked time at the edges of things -- the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood -- where all must pass but none quite belonged.

Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all, story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*. --Nicola Griffith, www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...

Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.

I don't belong to anyone ! I'm not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I'm a woman.

You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good.

They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there.

No one but her uncle knew that under Fursey's tutelage she could make her letters or that she understood Latin if it was spoken slowly—and even he seemed content to let her learn privately. Until she knew how these newcomers thought and what they wanted, she would keep it that way, keep her dice rattling in her cup. It was foolish to throw before all bets were on the table.

The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who lived on Earth were unaware that they lived on a gigantic gong that boomed out exactly sixty-nine times every day.

Hild fetched a lump of grey salt for Mildburh and mortar and pestle to crush it in. She loved the gritty crunch and thump under her hand. It sounded like a cat eating a bird.

There is one thing Margaret Thatcher said that I agree with: if you have to tell people you're important, you're not.

An Anglisc oath is like water. It pours into every part of you, every crevice. You can't hold any piece apart from it.

Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you'll wait forever.

Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid for what they had done together.

there was no power like a sharp and subtle mind weaving others' hopes and fears and hungers into a dream they wanted to hear. Always know what they want to hear—not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along

The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach-colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands. Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.

She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?

Even the dead had names.

The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe.

A name, she thinks, is what makes a person who they are. A name is how they know themself.

Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n'gus, queen daggerhorn sky—stately and slow-moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.

She walked the spiral corridor, running her hand along the painted horizon - sea, beach, dunes, woods, moors - the journey of her people from over the sea. The story of the Anglisc, woven with Woden back to the dawn of their songs. Ships. Fire. Bright swords. Kin and kine. Woods and wold. Hearth and home. Where was Christ in this? Christ didn't fight. Christ didn't farm.