Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Now he understood why her hounds spoke of her as they did: not human, more like a wall, a tide, the waxing of the moon. A force of nature. Implacable, untouchable.

One day, to suit some purpose of their own, her mother or her uncle would pluck her from her life and send her to live in a fen with a man she didn't know. In the world of skirt and sword, it was part of her wyrd. But not all her wyrd, and not yet. There was so much to learn, so much to know.

Her knuckles smelled of garlic and, faintly, that sleepy, buttery-toast scent my brain was already beginning to recognize.

We had never really talked to each other after I was nine years old. She had been busy and I had been resentful. I had grown up independent, and then she had not known how to find me. I wasn't even sure she wanted to, or what she might find if she did.

Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

You are a prophet and a seer with the brightest mind in an age. Your blood is that of a man who should have been king and a woman who is half sister to the king of Kent and wants to be a queen. That's what the king and his lords see. And they will kill you, one day. If not Edwin, then the king who kills him.

She reached out as if to touch me and for a second I thought I felt her fingers on my cheek, then realized I was crying.

The dogwood blossom was gone, azaleas in full bloom, and the air cupped my cheek as softly as a woman's hand.

Hild felt herself split in two: the butcher-bird thinking, I could take him, and the seer, I serve the king.

The musicians were hidden at the heart of the enclosure; the music seemed to come from the sky. God music.

I rubbed glistening liquid onto the armrests and imagined the hands that would touch the wood, perhaps resting there between turning the pages of a book, perhaps stroking the smooth wood, absently at first, then slipping a bit as the owner slept.

She could pretend it was enough to sit with a tablet weave between them, as women had for generations, and sometimes talk, sometimes fall into a half trance, mind floating free.

As summer turned to autumn, she hardly dared lift her gaze from the king's face. He gave no sign, but her dreams rang and echoed with danger.

Mildburh's eyes were muddy, honest blue, like hillberries. Hereswith's were as blue as their mother's, but without the cold blaze.

I meant simply to steady her, but she softened into me, almost sagged, and my arm tightened, and my need, and she let herself go so that I was half holding her up with one arm and pulling her pants down with the other.

You should talk to people. Ordinary people about ordinary things. Like you used to with Cian.

Kissing her was not like kissing Julia, who had been all length and plum softness, and whose messages had been very clear. Kick was like a powerful trapped beast. She stirred restlessly, one hand in the small of my back, pulling me closer, one on my shoulder pushing me away. I eased to one side, weight on my right elbow, head propped on my hand. I stroked her belly. The muscle loosened. She sighed. The sigh sounded as though it had a smile in it. I smiled in the dark.

You have thrown out a signal bright enough to draw any who can hear and see; now they will be clamouring to enter you, to know you, to have you as a bee might climb inside a flower. And like a bee they will strip you bare and leave you heavy will all that makes you who you are.

Silence while we both thought our thoughts.

The flesh is nearly burnt from your bones and the human from your heart. You're nothing but wyrd and ælf breath. Spend less time in the wind.

Sitting in the fire in the summer evening as Hild the daughter of the might-have-been king, not Hild the seer of the overking, speaking nothing but British, she felt her face setting in a new shape, happier, younger.

That lass is yours. Protect her.

We're like the moths," Begu said. "The priests and Uinniau and Cian are like bats. When we go back to York, we'll have to stop, lie down, for a while.

Light of the world. This was what she knew. This was who she was. Her wyrd had been before she was. She chose this path, this place, because she had always chosen.