Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Her hand felt good in Peretur's, warm, more than warm.

The air is as thick as potato soup and you have to breathe in sips.

Send me strength, she called-to whom?-and kicked Bony to a gallop, and hurled her javelin hard and true.

Hild realised that every shape the man's body made refused the words, and the bard was nodding along. The bard had made the speech.

Hild bent over and vomited stinging bile, then through her weeping, killed the man at her feet.

First the half-lidded look, then the widening eyes, the black pupils swelling like ink dropped in water, swallowing the blue centres leaving the outer pleats of his eyes green and glistening, swarming like flies looking for something to eat, someone to hurt to make himself strong and safe.

I don't want to be here alone. I want you to stay." "People don't stay just because you want them to.

Your eyes are different in this light. No colour at all. Like cement.

It was a look Hild recognised: a cat watching a stunned mouse in no hurry to kill. Who was his smile for?

Why Christ and his priests should care what we do with each other, I don't know. But they like to meddle.

Stay in the world, she had said, and this was the world I had made.

Gods were like the flotsam that washed up with the waves, always coming and going, and those big enough to remain gradually were worn away by wind and water and time.

She closed her eyes, willing her vision to rise from the blood-spattered green mountainside.

The Christ and his priests were different. They were a storm that would change everything. They read. They would sweep the beach clean. But not of her. That was not her wyrd.

Now his knowledge was her knowledge.

A man was speaking intensely, passionately, with a strong accent, spattering words about him like matted glass. She closed her eyes. She didn't understand most of it-heresy, apostasy, Gehenna-but he seemed upset about something Eorpwald had done.

No one knew me; there was no one to compare my behaviour in the shop with my behaviour at other times. I could be fluid and responsible only to myself.

Along the little river, kingfishers caught news and water beetlees, and on the big river when Hild walked with her mother and the queen-talking, as always, of wood and trade-she saw the pawprints of other kits.

Have you kissed anyone? Boldcloak? Your gemæcce?" Hild shook her head. "Well, perhaps they were frightened of kissing the king's seer. But I'm not. I know what you need.

Two risks, not one. But it was done.

This is a craftsman cabin, built for my great-grandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler's shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance." His smile was real this time. "You always have been a snob, Torvingen." "I like well-made things.

Guns can be a distraction, a dangerous focus of one's authority, a crutch. Many come to depend on them: take away the gun and you take away their identity.

Bed games were one thing, keys another.

Gwladus smiled, that rich slow curve that blotted out everything but right here, right now, then leaned in and kissed her.