Quotes from Nicola Griffith

Her mother had trained her to accept every advantage: to smell like the queen would be a mark of great favour, one people would notice without knowing it.

Hild stared at him, her mind smooth as wax.

They bared their teeth-the same muscles, the same sinews, the same teeth-in the same wild grin. The same-shaped arms swing over the same strong rib cages. The same long feet moved over the grass. And now they laughed like children. But they fought like dogs in the pit. They fought against fate.

He's kind, yes, but he will hurt you nonetheless, because he will leave. This is not his place. You've only to look in his eyes.

The women called to one another, shouted at the stupid beasts that milled in confusion, cursed when one enterprising animal made a run for the open plain. Uaithne's braids burned in the sun like rivers of hot Irish gold as she chased it and brought it down in a tangle of legs.

Hild looked at the hot spark and flicker of her carnelians and pretended they were coals. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been warm. Couldn't even remember when she'd eaten something hot.

I touched my reflection with a fingertip. My reflection felt nothing. That's what I wanted from the world, to feel nothing. To feel nothing and not be involved, for everything to stay comfortably outside myself and not get in. How did people survive all this knowledge of suffering in the world? How did they carry it around, day after day, and not go mad? And what would I wear tomorrow?

There was a world of complication in that one word.

She clung to the saddle horn. If she fell now, he would kill her. She must hold on.

A movement made a hundred times before, a thousand times before, except this time, instead of muscle and nerve performing their everyday miracle of coordination, I tilted to the right and started to fall.

When she left it was the last full swell of summer, when apples hung formed but still green from the trees.

We ride in service to a dream from the gods. If our dreamer's horse fails, you will give her yours. If her food runs low, you will her your own. She will light our way. And now we ride.

I am the light, she thought. I am not a maid. I am the light. Cold as a sword. I will show no weakness.

The shocked silence of last night had given way to mutterings which had become resignation, then calm acceptance: Uaithne had killed a Brigannon, yes, had plunged them all into a feud with another tribe that might be the death of them all before spring, but she was also Echraidhe, one of them, their sister, and her madness-if it was madness-was bright and proud and beautiful.

The troll lives in his bones and walks abroad wearing his skin, even under the sun.

I am Aud Torvingen. Aud, rhymes with crowd.

She accepted the mantle of the uncanny and until the end of this journey it was her fate. It was her vision they marched to, into a future she had dreamt for them.

You must learn to speak those thoughts of yours sometimes, child, or those who watch-like those gesith hounds of yours-will decide for themselves what you think, who you are, whose side you are on. For there are sides. Though I don't know which is yours.

Therese lifted her shoulders, losing that zen poise as nasty reality intruded on her nice, clean, middle-class understanding.

Hild," he said. "Now I know that name. You are in the lady Breguswith's dream, the jewel that will light my way.

If she kept moving, she didn't have to think. She didn't have to see into herself. If she kept moving, no else could see into her, either.

Be present, stay alert: the first rule of self-defense. But then I wouldn't be able to shut out the noise and stink and tension around me.

She stepped to one side of her feelings like stepping out of her clothes.

Your humble correspondent bids you to remember the road to Lindum and our conversation about the brightest bead of all. He is everywhere.