Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Stay in the world, Aud. Stay alive inside. Promise me. Stay alive.

Blood rushed sweet and hot under my skin and laughter bubbled up through me and I loosed it.

After some months on the road she was taller still, her muscles hard but her smile more ready.

Every time she swallowed, she gleamed. Every time she lifted a hand, she glittered. Every time she breathed, she glinted. She was breathing fast; her legs trembled; the glitter and gleam and glint became an endless shimmer.

You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes for your own good.

They knew she was a creature of the uncanny so let her protect herslf with wyrd and stave while she went to other worlds and communed with the gods.

He rested his palm on the pommel of his sword in what Peretur recognized not as a threat but the habit of a possessive man reassuing himself of his treasure. Mine. This is mine and you may not have it.

We could acknowledge it between us as long as it remained unspoken.

The sword called to her, and somehow Arturus felt it.

Hild stood cloakless, impervious to the chill. It fed the legend-the main who felt nothing.

Her scent-earthy and light, like the smell of crisp baby carrots when you first pull them from the ground-mixed with that of sawdust and leaf mold.

As she rode, her dreams filled with that yielding breast and warm breath and those luscious lips until she thought she might run mad.

She liked the feel of him. He was clever, but straight-grained. Sound as an oak staff.

Port Central had become a sophisticated prison for its inmates, while the natives roamed a whole world.

Command isolated her more effectively than a deadly disease.

I wanted to know about the woman who thought this was something I had done, but I wasn't in any particular hurry. Let her come to me.

She longed for the sound of girls' voices or a woman singing as she fed chickens.

The gesiths they passed sang a cheerful, ugly song. One in four rode with poles topped by brutalised heads of Lindeymen. They did not look human. Hild pretended they were not.

The scop's chant moved majestically from folk and fold to hearth and hall, wealth and wire, his rolling Anglics now transmuted into the language of flame, and gold and honour.

This hand can birth children. This hand can make music. This hand can kill you.

She swallowed, and her heart filled with light she had known as a child.

I never knew my father," she said again, slowly. She could only tell the truth. "Of the rest, I may not speak.

Speaking straight felt different. She found she liked it.

It was only now that she understood, for the first time, that despite her title, her uniform, and the two stars on her shoulder, she was as helpless as any native herder or farmer or sailor.