Quotes from Nicola Griffith

When you fight to be taken seriously, you don't smile in photos.

We are more than half of humanity. We are not imitation people, or chameleons taking on protective male coloration, longing for the day when men go away and we can return to being our true, insectlike selves. We are here, now. We are just like you.

When she thought at all, she thought in British, the language of the high places, of wild and wary and watchful things. A language of resistance and elliptical thoughts.

Whenever we come to a new place, I waylaid strangers and dragged their stories and songs and jokes from them before they ever had a chance to find out my name.

That's what I wanted from the world, to feel nothing. To feel nothing and not be involved, for everything to stay comfortably outside myself and not get in. How did people survive all this knowledge of suffering in the world? How did they carry it around, day after day, and not go mad?

Behind her smile, her thoughts whirred like a pole lathe, back and forth, shaving the layers.

Exposed meant conspicuous, different, not fitting in, not feeling at home, at least not until you learn that your self is your home and no one can take it away.

You were protecting yourself. You wrapped yourself in armor and pretended to be invulnerable. Growing up inside that armor twisted you a bit out of true, but it doesn't matter. The essentials are all there." She searched my face. "The armor's getting too small, Aud. You have to choose.

Life, death, change, they happened most at the edge of things: where forest meets clearing, air meets water.

She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned her snakestone over and over. She found it helped her think.

It's as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there's nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and the brittle exterior. But I don't have that job anymore. No shell. But if I don't have that then what do I have?

Love wasn't a state change. Romance might be, and lust, and like, but they were just the preconditions. Love was the choice you made; day in, day out.

She wanted to ask what he meant but in the game they played she lost points if she had to ask.

She said nothing, hoping her silence would goad him into explaining.

The cloud cover was heavy and multilayered, shades of slate blue and silver, pearl and charcoal, like a sketch washed with watercolour.

The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like bluewhite cats-o'-nine-tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core.

She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn't see the pattern. There was a piece missing.

For everyone knew Fiachnae would rise again, it's what the Irish did, and mac Báetáin was cannier than most.

A battle, shield wall to shield wall. Linden wood to linden wood. She imagined meeting a man the size of Forthere, huge with battle rage, stinking with it; dogs dripping and snarling at her legs, her arms. Sharp swords cleaving down, splintering shields, crushing skulls, slicing off faces. Men sworn to follow their lord or die. Victory or death, no middle ground.

Wind swept dark tatters across a sky rippling with luminous cloud from horizon to horizon like a well-muscled torso, bringing with it the smell of dust and grass and a sweetness she could not identify.

I sipped the coffee. It was delicious, perfectly prepared, as I imagine anything prepared by Annie Miclasz would be. One of those formidable women who felt they had to hide their efficiency behind a soft, caring front; who hid for so long that the front became real; one of the women who kept the world turning; one of the women it paid to never, ever cross.

These people were utterly human. But what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one's own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.

She wondered why modern creations became uglier faster.

All different yet somehow alike-not family but easy with one another and loud, laughing and singing, bright and clean. The same bright, the same clean she remembered from the scent of the promised lake. The girl's heart soared: a story came alive from legend, knights hunting dragons!