Quotes from Nicola Griffith

She leaned back, the very picture of ease and Anglisc wealth with her smooth honey hair, fine-draped dress, and gold winking at throat and wrist.

Here I know nobody; nobody knew me.

You have MS. But you're fit now, as long as you stay cool, and maybe you'll be able to do stunt work for years. You also leap to conclusions without thinking, you give everything, even trees, their own name, you get weird and don't talk when you should." I looked at the oddly bald little bottle in her hand. "And you steal my beer.

She had sworn to be totem and token to her people, to light their path, not darken it.

Her smile was the kind of smile Hild had imagined on the water sprite's face as she pulled her down and drowned her.

Hild looked deeper, letting her mind sink into the glimmer and shadow, as she might in the world, looking at the leaves, or lying on her back watching the clouds, letting the thoughts come, letting the things she already knew arrange themselves in a pattern, a story that other might call a prophecy.

Bravery is relative. Perhaps it's the same with dreams.

She withdrew to the shadows and began the long walk back under a twist of stars.

If a lord was frightening, a noble lady was terrifying.

I could probably beat you at pool." She tucked a strand of hair behind her golden ear. "No, you couldn't." "I beat you at darts." "We're getting off the subject." "You just hate being beaten." "Call it one of my imperfections.

Her mother, changing sides so gradually, so carefully that even Hild hadn't noticed.

Autumn, like grief, changes everything.

Hild roamed the vale and its thicket of woods, collecting herb and watching the world slow down, fade, and tidy itself away for winter.

She liked hearing James's stories. She liked his accent, hot and spicy as mulled win. Even his Latin; such a different Latin from Fursey's.

I didn't believe in ki, or the energy from the earth, or light shooting out of fingertips, but the fact was, when I relaxed and thought about energy flowing smooth and liquid through my arms, my arm didn't bend.

Hild forgot about the princess's eyes when she saw the beads: seventy-three faced carnelians.

There was no world in which she would be queen to another's king. Eanflæd would be peaceweaver. She was the light of the world.

The late afternoon sky over the lake this time was grey, but the water laughed and sparkled, reflecting the blue sky and other time and place.

Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. For the first time, I understood something about Dornan before he did.

If she used weapons the way she used words, no one would stand against her; they'd have no idea where the stroke would fall next.

Hild slipped away to sit in the moon shadow of a tufted dune with the sheathed knife in her lap and listen to the night breeze in the grass and think about nothing in particular.

She looked at her big hand, red now. Men's blood. She had killed a man; more than one man. The world looked no different, but she felt different in it, as though it had tilted on its axis and the line of stars had changed.

This was how it would be for her, she realised when Edwin king decided he no longer needed a seer. She would stand, plump and fed and brushed like a sacrificial cow, with gilded horns and a ribbon around her neck, too stupid to know she was being led to slaughter.

She loved peregrines in winter: solitary, fierce, and dangerous, their cries clean and bright as a blade.