Quotes from Nicola Griffith

You let my mother know what you're about," she said in Irish, just in case. "On purpose. My mother knows this. And you two are deep in your game, and I am one of those bees, sent by the queen bee to buzz from hive to hive to flower, not knowing what's really going on." "Well," he said. "I'm surprised it took you so long.

Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted to do all along.

This is your body. Yours. No one but you has the responsibility to keep it, to keep yourself, whole. If someone pins you to the ground, what will you do?

She was caught in what felt like a dream, one of those endless dreams that turned on itself, one she couldn't escape. It unfurled with dreadful lack of surprise. It had all happened before.

For one brief moment the three of them were one, and they stood against six attackers almost without effort.

Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage surging light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration. She was going to do her job. At last.

She would shout at the girl and rant, confusing her, confusing the tales, for now Elen herself was in them.

Her face had been digitally erased and replaced by the star's, but I would have recognized anywhere those shoulders and tight waist, the way she turned like an eel through the air, as though she had all the time in the world.

The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spider-webs across her face and kept wanting to hush it away, wipe it from her skin.

One afternoon when the winter was done and the world had begun to turn towards the light, with green shoots thrusting through the dark earth, the girl roamed the high fell in the steeper, northern part of the valley.

Edwin smiled at her, that spreading, lard-melt smile of a king roping his subject, harnessing her to his purpose.

The local legend is of some harried god turning all the snakes into stone so that he could get some peace from the peasants' pitiful petitioning.

Honesty and frankness did not mean the captured bandits were fine folk, or kind, only that they might not murder another in their sleep.

Watching in dumb show and from a distance made the whole thing look like some strange strange puppet performance, utterly divorced from me and my life.

All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces until the known becomes the only.

She laid her hand briefly against Hild's cheek, which startled Hild so much she nearly knocked her cup over.

It will rain, and the blood will wash away and the carcass will be taken away and all will be fresh and new.

Shift your balance and everything changes.

By the time the acorns began to harden, farmers had begun to send messages to her, pleas to rid their heath or valley or wood of bandits.

Pray no one is clever enough to look beyond the child to her mother and the terrible ambition there.

Her tenderness was unbearable. She was nine years old. She knew how to kiss me better: a simple thing, but one I could never have taught her. And I had come here to save her.

Mindy Lepke had a large corner cubicle, with a window view. She looked like a stoat: small and bright-eyed and probably vicious when cornered.

Hild stepped forward so the moon caught her face, thin and pale.

Sinner, his mouth said, doomed sinner and no more my rival.