Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Hild watched them and the other not-yet-girdled girls-Cille and Leofe, who were already meant for each other, and half a dozen younger-and wondered when her mother might choose her gemæcce and who it might be.

Light is a comfort, a human thing, and it pleases me. It reminds me I'm mortal.

She was taller than all the unmatched girls, even the ones with breast buds, just as her mother was taller than the queen and Cian was unusually tall for a boy with a wealh mother.

Mountainside, cloaked in falling straight into water as smooth and reflective as glass. You knew, looking at it, that it was a mile deep. Lush spring flowers, laughing sky. But changeable, and everywhere bones of rock. Good country in summer, but dangerous if approached without caution and, in winter, utterly isolated from the next valley by the mountains suddenly cloaked in ice and mist. Troll country.

Hild did what she always she did when she couldn't influence a thing; she stopped thinking about it.

She stood alone at the empty heart of a gone god, staff in the crook of her arm, one hand on her seax and the other on her cross. She would not wear and weather. She was Yffing. She would be totem and token for her people, the light of the world.

Breguswith's eyes were hard, bright blue, with none of that milky aging Hild saw in Æffe's and Brugen's eyes.

His clothes smelt of the crisp green-apple smoke of burning birch from the hearth of Wen, the young widow with the freckles, who shaved the priests and those of the king's men who liked smooth chins.

By the time they saw the outer walls of Caer Leon, her legs were steadier though inside she felt a shiver like an ash key twirling too fast in the wind.

I'm not pretty." "You don't need to be pretty. You're like lightning. Like a tide. Like a blizzard." "Something to run from." "Something to get caught up in. Somthing to remember for the rest of your life.

You would look good in the old-fashioned clerical garb, the long black coat and dog collar. Those pale, pale eyes, the way you nod intently and sit so still…" she laughed then, a little brittle vocal shimmer that tried to hide the loss and bewilderment, tried to turn it all into an amusing game. "So here I am, confessing my sins. But what I want isn't forgiveness. Or penance. It's information.

He was ferment and rot wearing the gear of a prince and lord, a wave of blood and rage.

Sometimes I used my fingers, digging down into the rich dirt, feeling it push under my nails. No doubt I'd regret it later, but it was good to feel so much life under my hands.

She opened her mouth and let the wind take her breath away.

She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on the bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow.

The wine was warm now from being by the fire, its taste as rounded and familiar as the roof of my mouth. It would be very easy to just to finish this bottle, then start another one, sleep soundly, and get up in the morning and go about my business rebuilding the cabin, pretending to turn it into a home.

Orange is just change, Sara. Not all good, not all bad. Just different.

I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

I kissed her, and stroked the soft planes of flank and thigh, teased with a fingertip and breath and gaze, and when she shuddered like a kite on a long line, when she began to whip and plunge, when she begged me, I turned her and steadied her and let her loose. It was always the same. They flew and I flew, but to different places.

The world sharpened suddenly, as brilliant and bright as when she got rain in her eye.

It was best to approach royalty with answers, not questions.

Just inside the tent, the king, unhelmed, stood with his naked sword in one hand, point resting on the floor, and a goblet in his other.

As always when she was trying to learn a new language, she opened her mind and let the sound wash through it.

She could smell herself: rich, sleek, ready.