Quotes from Nicola Griffith

She smiled, but it was a disturbing, hard flexing of bane and muscle.

Aud rhymes with cowed.

They would write songs of what followed: the horses dancing; the spears flickering like swords, faster than the eye could see; Llanza's perfect seat; Peretur's grace, lithe as a cat; the sweat running down their mounts' flanks. The crack of Llanza's spear as it split.

She didn't like the princely Boldcloak much. She missed her Cian. Missed the Cian she might have told of misjudging bandits and what eagles saw.

Peretur rode now through lands abandoned by people and sharp with the scent of vinegar where apples, unpicked, had fallen and rotted in the grass.

She had no idea why it was important and her heart was kicking like a hare. But she had been trained to show a still face so she raised her own mantle and looked back.

War with smiles and firm handshakes.

Under the ferocity Fursey heard the howling loneliness. But ferocity was winning.

She will never say what the girl's true name is, or who the other was, and the stories are never the same. And always the cave is hidden.

She looked at the bag, slitty-eyed as a cat by a mouse hole.

What mattered was the truth, rising like birdsong, like the scent of flowers opening to the sun, of her wyrd. Cian's hand beneath hers. It always had been so. It had always been meant to be so. Fate goes over as it must.

She looked, left and right. She couldn't see as much as she'd like; the unfamiliar veil got in the way. No doubt she'd learn to manage that, how to use it to her advantage, as her mother did.

There are always people missing. And sometimes I see their ghosts.

Underground parking garages, like the interior of submarines, are malevolent in their ugliness and lack of human comfort, in their machine-oil smell, their lack of natural light, their sense of confinement.

Gwladus stood before her, close enough to smell. Hild didn't look up. If she did, she would pull Gwladus close and never let her go.

A good land, and rich, but poisoned by fear.

Gwladus, my honey, bring us food. Bring us a lot of it. Your lady is all bone; her face looks sharp enough to cut cheese.

The realization of what she had done, the exhilaration of her own strength rushed into her, like champagne rushing to fill lead crystal. She shimmered with it, she fizzed. I wanted to lift her in both hands, drink her down, drain her, feel the foam inside me, circling around heart, lungs, stomach.

She moved faster, and so did he. She leaned farther, and so did he. Then she began to draw on the life around her-the hum in the air, the flight of the kicked dirt-and changed again.

It took him a moment to change gears, but politicians live or die by their ability to seize a proferred alliance.

Contempt for others, like a dog driven from the hall, always found its way back.

She laid her hand, brief and light as a drift of hawthorn blossom, on Hild's head.

We would have lost more without our mysterious helper who has melted away like mist.

He looked so small and wounded in his bright jacket that I opened my arms and pulled him in. He wrapped his hands around my hips, leaned his forehead on my breastbone and wept. He smelled of woodsmoke and tea.