Quotes from Nicola Griffith

When a time came to carve her name, would it be Dawnged, girl of Ystrad, T´ywi or Tâl, payment to Elen, or would she one day find her true name?

She saw more blood in the snow that winter than she had in the whole of her life.

It felt like a moment out of time, endless. The grass was pleasantly prickly against her thighs and arms. She stretched, wiggled, laughed: happy.

His forehead glistened. He knew me, what I might do if he pushed too hard. Something was so important to him that he thought it was worth the risk; I would have to hurt him or listen.

I was walking, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

This was the kind of work I understood. I knew where wood came from, that for every tree cut down, another was planted, that I could make a chair both functional and beautiful. I was adding to the world, not taking.

She felt taller than an oak, taller than an elm. They would sing songs of the king's seer, the queen of wyrd.

How would she be the light of the world feeling like this?

Her childhood, her life, and she kept forgetting; her mother's geas kept taking it away. Then she was thinking of her mother, seeing her in the clearing on one of her good days, forget-me-not eyes dancing with light. Mother? She listened. Nothing.

Writing and coin. She could send a message and gift to anyone, anywhere. She could watch and weave the pattern of the world. And all she had to do was earn the gifts to turn into coin was to see clearly, see first.

The urge to roam increased upon her like a thirst.

He was always just about to leave, always about to pick up the phone, and he always persuaded himself for a minute or two that stretched into thirty, into two hours, into night. We go back a long way.

She swayed with Bony, loose and lithe as the river, while the bandit knight bore down on like a red tide.

Without anyone to please, she no longer bent and swayed. No longer willow but oak.

She left her hood down, letting the rain cling to her hair, wanting to hear while her body walked and her mind wandered.

Hild understood and suspended judgment, as she had learnt to do in her strange position as the light of the world in a maid's clothes. And yet she was ten, only ten, her heft only that of her gaze and words and bearing, especially on days like this when she had set out in her plainest short cyrtel and hose and left all her fine stuff safe and dry in Begu's room.

It didn't matter about Luz. She was nothing to do with me. Sending money was all I needed to do. More. I hadn't put her with the foster parents in Arkansas. I didn't have to help her, or any of the others-because, oh, suddenly it was so clear that there were others. Many, many others.

She wiped her eyes, her not-blue eyes, and walked on through a drift of rain so fine it settled on her sleeve like dew.

Always know what they like, her mother said. They will love you for it.

After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn't see people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way and he wouldn't notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit.

Poison had made the world so beautiful.

Now when she spied on women and men she crept close and closer, closer than was safe, because she was drawn to the curve of a lip, the gleam of sweat on a throat, and she longed to feel the weigh of glossy hair on her skin.

Most of those who would become bandits were good, decent folk; they would form if they could. He is right to try. Right to hope for it, right to fight for it. That's what I would fight for.

My face looked like a picture of someone else. I turned this way and that. No, more like a picture of a rock after some vandal has ripped off its decades-old layer of moss and soil, and the bare stone is revealed.