Quotes from Nicola Griffith

She was wearing a hacking jacket and turtleneck, a riding hat tricked under her left arm. I wondered what the photo opportunity had been, and why she looked happy. She hated houses. Her hair was dark honey streaked with grey and cut in a soft, chin-length bob. It looked all wrong; my mother had had long hair for as long as I could remember. She had gained a few pounds. She looked younger and softer.

The Audi felt like a banker's car: beautifully machined, competent but not compassionate, giving the driver a sense of admiration, but not involvement.

He was looking at her too hard; his eyes were startling against his dark skin, like burnished bronze, glowing and greening in summer sun.

Marghe was perturbed by her sense of security in Aoife's presence, recognizing the feeling for what it was: the passing of responsibility for her personal safety from herself to Aoife. That scared her almost as much as Uaithne had.

More than once, they wrapped in furs and cloaks and walked through the garden in the moonlight, still talking. Sometimes they just walked in silence, and Marghe thought she could hear Thenike's heart.

Being puzzled mad him anxious. Being anxious made him angry.

I had needed the animal warmth of the sex, had welcomed the familiar building heat of skin on skin, the harsh breath, the shudder that starts in your bones. The terrible urge afterwards to weep until I howled had been new.

Whatever she did she would find herself thinking of people who weren't there.

No doubt her uncle had his reasons.

Begu laughed, too, that shimmery, silvery laugh Hild would always associate with light along with a wet beach and the smell of the sea and took her hand.

In my Armani suit I cut through the crowd like a hammerhead among trout.

The vision trembled before her, like a drop of rain on an outstretchd fingertip, brilliant, beautiful, perfect.

She imagined Begu's mother, Enynny and Ennynny's mother, and her mother before her, back into memory, sitting here by the ferns drinking the cold, minty water, and talking quietly in British. So many. All gone into the mist. She felt a twist inside, a longing for a family and home that never was.

She let the ebb and flow of the hall wash over her, much as she sometimes sat behind bracken at the edge of a clearing or reeds by the edge of a pool.

It was easy to talk to Begu. Perhaps because she said such strange things, perhaps because Hild got the sense she never took people seriously.

Desire wrapped its arms around her and held her still, helpless, able only to breathe.

Hild put together her information like a broken redcrest pavement and pondered the picture.

Hild had forgotten how Begu's thoughts flocked like starlings, flicking this way then that.

Her hands were gloved, small for her height-she was five six or seven-and her movements as clean as a poem. I was surprised and not sure why. She felt my gaze and looked up. Grey-blue eyes, soft as dove feathers.

She and Eric were not looking at each other, but I could tell that, in the way of some couples, they were intensely aware of each other's body language and were exchanging a private communication.

I have my fa's hair. Not soft like yours." "I like how yours feels wiry and strong. Like you.

His eyes were brilliant, his cheeks hectic, but it was joy. This was what he'd been looking for all his life, to be a gesith, and do as gesiths do, and here he was, at the hall of the overking of the Anglisc, about to test his mettle against the king's own.

She was a piece of work. He was better off without her.

The caterer was chatting, standing wide-legged and easy, knife moving this way and that as she talked, taking up her space a little too aggressively, the way women who have been raised with a lot of brothers tend to in a group of men. It was clear she had never considered using the knife for anything but food preparation; there was no awareness of its edge and balance as it related to the soft skin of the men around her.