Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Fursey was now eating—and drinking, always drinking—at Mulstan's expense, not her uncle's. The gift of kings, her mother said: to make others pay.

Being here is like standing at the edge of the sea under a wide sky: clear, open, clean, and bright. Here is where I am meant to be.

It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.

Beeches were rare north of the Humber, and she loved the way they whispered in the wind, like women before they fell asleep.

Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.

Women, in short, have been trained to believe that they're not allowed to be angry." "Trained," Katherine said loudly. "You're always talking about training, like we're dogs or something." "It's not polite to raise your voice," I said, and she immediately hunched and blushed. Suze frowned. "Don't frown," I said to her, "you'll get wrinkles." Silence.

The childlike thing sitting on a cygnet-coloured gelding with a silvered saddle and wearing a brooch worth a son's ransom must be the princess niece with a reputation as a seer and sorceress.

Hwl's thumping began to slow as her cream turned to butter.

Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples split over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish.

There are no commandments against love," he said.

We never spoke of it but we knew that to come within the orbit of each other's skin-scent and cellular hum could end only one way: falling helplessly, spectacularly into the other's gravity well, momentarily brilliant like all falling stars, but doomed, because I loved Rose. And this friendship was too precious to burn.

Not knowing the right definitions is no different from not having the right tools to fix a burst water pipe.

The tide of life ran so strong in Peretur that she could not stop if she wanted to, and she did not want to, but it was her gift to soothe worries and calm nerves, so she soothed Rhodri.

Hild faced him influencing, because Edwin was like a dog: show fear and he would chose you down. But then she broke her gaze. To challenge an uneasy before his men was to invite death.

You're like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he'd done to me.

Power and ambition were two edges of the same sword, as she knew herself. She wanted to be powerful so she could protect her people; she had people because she was powerful. And there were different kinds of power: the still, pent power of the seer; the free, raging power of the butcher-bird. But did there have to be only one path?

when the snow begins to fall once again, she catches a flake on her tongue and feels, lapping against her belly, the lake it was drawn from by summer sun, far away—a lake like a promise she will one day know. Then as the world folds down for winter, so too do the girl and her mother, listening to the crackle of flame and, beyond the leather door curtain, the soft hiss of snow settling over the hills and hollows like white felt.

Hild knew where this was going, but questions would only send Begu's thoughts flying in all directions.

Early morning of Harvest Day, Peretur was filling a bucket at the well, and swirling the water to and fro with her hand, half dreaming when the lake song to her, and today the lake's song was strong and insistent and it was for her.

This country's bones and flesh are made of rock and its blood is the ice-cold water of glacier melt.

I stood there for a long time after he bumped his way over the turf and down the track, until the smell of his exhaust had faded into the trees and soil, and I could hear nothing but the buds. The air smelled like rain.

They'd left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire sands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics.

The mirror showed a face with wild eyes and skinned-back lips, the face of a fox gone mad.

Begu laughed, but it was a soft laugh, quite grown-up, and it made Hild long to hold her and shield her from the world.