Quotes from Nicola Griffith

She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, snaking heavy and solid into the bones of her hand.

If you walk as though your mind is easy, your mind believes your body and becomes easy. If your mind is easy, your body believes it and becomes easy: a basic feedback loop.

She would watch and learn. Find out why Paulinus was taking such an interest in her, the king's niece, why he seemed to want to persuade her of his god.

I love to feel the sun rub against my pale northern skin, love its fingers reaching down into muscle and bone.

When an imago first pushes free of the budding chrysalis and unfolds its still-damp wings, anything, even something as ephermal as breath, can deform the final, glorious insect. A crass question now could crush this fragile new understanding. I asked anyway.

She was the only ungirdled girl to work on the main loom, the only one tall enough. The only one with the pattern-making mind, her mother said. The one one without a gemæcce.

It was snowing. Her suit warmed rapidly, and the starvision visor turned the world smoky gray, ethereal, with the snow drifting down in black flakes. The grass was frozen, but she could not hear the crunch of her footsteps: all sound, all vision, all sensation was filtered by her suit. She was isolated from the world, just as though this were one of her first virtual-reality training missions as a cadet.

This boy is a man. Twice the man you are. He is kind where you're cruel, he is strong where you're weak, and he knows full well how to make a girl want to be got, and to get her. And when he does, he can last long, longer, I wager, than you! He is Peretur Paladn Hir, and he is destined for greatness!

It would be so easy-my right hand on his right wrist, pull and step, left arm across his throat, whirl and spread my arms, like a dance, and he would drop spine-down over my thigh, snap: less than three seconds, start to finish-but a broken boy would help nothing.

He smiled again, pleased but it didn't hide the tightness in his jaw, the worry and the weariness.

If I'd known that all it took to worm my way into a woman's heart was to let her beat the shit out of me, my early life would have been different.

As I moved past the big houses shrouded by dripping trees I fought the urge to look over my shoulder. Looking back would frighten her. I told myself there was nothing unusual about a woman walking the streets at midnight-I did it-but my hindbrain was stirring.

Sometimes people have to do new things, things that have never been done before. Everything your foremothers did was new once.

We sat silently, contemplating the ghosts we had created between us, and the difference between our world and that of most people.

Every belt buckle must be gold, every drape silver, every veil like gossamer.

It pleases me to wear silk couture and pearls. I like the way it feels on my skin, the way it fits.

Me, I'll just continue to pretend I'm both blind and stupid, and brightly say the things other people find foolish, and so make the truth foolish.

The people who built these churches understood wood, and they were not in a hurry.

I could feel the open air, taste salt on the breeze.

Dornan gave me a wink, as if to say he saw I was glowing under a bit of flattery as much as anyone else in the room.

It was as their lady, dealer of wyrd and woe, that she judged the miserable bandits they chased down, the children, women, and men hauled cowering in groups of bramble thickets, hiding in twos in an overstood coppice, or sniveling along in a half-eaten bud in the lee of a rock.

She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn't see the pattern.

Just as I thought I was beginning to know this world and understand it, it throws more magic at me." "What's life without magic? Turn your magic into a song, share it with others." "You know I can't sing." "A story, then.

It's not an easy message to deliver quick off the tongue.