Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Mother and daughter considered each other. Different hair, different eyes, different hearts. Both tall enough that people whispered of etin blood. Both with bright, pattern-making minds.

In Atlanta at one o'clock on a Thursday morning I would have had downtown to myself, but Seattle's center flickered with flashes of restless, contradictory life.

Her face had the set look Marghe had learned meant she was unhappy.

Moisture from the camera trickled down her neck, as far as the collarbones, which rose and fell, rose and fell. I wondered if the water would still be cool or whether it would have warmed running down her skin.

Those eyes saw everything. The green saw your heart, they said, the blue your mind, and the black…the black drank in wyrd and your woe so others would be safe. Killing was nothing to what thos eyes had seen.

The tribe, the tribe, nothing but the tribe. It was all she knew. I just didn't matter to her, in the end. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, won though everything in her heart told her otherwise. How can people do that?" "Perhaps she did what she could to help." "She was my jailer." "She taught you to survive.

For Hild, seer, prophet, and most favoured niece, on her birth day.

Partnerships should be equal. You can protect her, yes, but shouldn't she also be able to protect you?

The child's world changed late one afternoon, though she didn't know it.

If she's to guide kings, she'll need subtlety, and all the Anglisc know is blade and blood and boast." Hild said in Irish, "You have not met my mother.

Hild had forgotten. She was twelve years old.

The patterns was changing, she could taste it, feel it in the different weight and heft of her body every morning, in th way her mother looked at her.

Being capable of using violence to defend yourself did not make you a bad person. Being dead because you couldn't did not make you a good one.

The sky was soft and milky, like the plain; it was as if she stood inside a hollow pearl. It made her dizzy.

You're not mine to give away. You belong to the tribe." "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.

I don't want to be Marghe the anthopologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don't think I am her anymore. But I don't know who I want to be.

She liked time at the edge 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.

Belonging was not a seer's wyrd.

I had seen her vulnerable, now she wanted to see me.

Trouble meant they had to listen, not fight.

The people had abducted her, submerged her in the timeless otherworld that was no more real than the underwater palaces of those other abductors, the Sidhe, the unearthly faerie who stole human children, twisted their souls from their bodies, and filled them instead with dark glamour. Nothing was real.

The curve of her cheek, the top of her shoulder where her shift had slipped, had the bloom and sheen of just-risen cream ready to be licked.

For now that they sat close Peretur understood that the cool depths she had dreamt of lived as much in this woman as in the lake.

Norway: a solid world aganist which to lay myself and make a mask that could be examined, could be held up in comparison with who I used to be, before.