Quotes About Identity

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.

I wanted them to learn something unique to them, that came from them, not an artificial overlay that would evaporate in the first flash of fear adrenaline if they were ever threatened.

If Hild thought of sides, she thought of plots, of her mother, of Lindsey, its blood, its stink, and the world began to dissolve into a white hiss so that she wanted to step away from her body and become the marble maid again.

For a while she enjoyed a life in which she behaved exactly as she should: a royal maid with no secrets.

My mother's soul was still Norwegian in a way that mine was not.

Suddenly she was not sure about anything anymore, and that was frightening. If she did not want to do what she had set out to do, then what did she want? Something had changed. Some part of her was gone.

All the things that make you you, your clarity and solidity and certainty, come from this. You can actually reach out and touch your past. It's in the wood, in the cold, clear water of the fjord and the hard rock of the mountain. And the wood and the fjord and the mountain are in you, clear and strong and massive." She looked at me then, reached out to trace the line of my cheekbone, my nose, my jaw. "Aud, Aud, Aud.

When a woman trespasses amongst the stones of the ancestors, she belongs to the Echraidhe. She becomes Echraidhe. Like horse and herd, she belongs to the tribe. Like me, like you.

Self-consciousness, the curse of Western womanhood.

Mother and daughter considered each other. Different hair, different eyes, different hearts. Both tall enough that people whispered of etin blood. Both with bright, pattern-making minds.

The tribe, the tribe, nothing but the tribe. It was all she knew. I just didn't matter to her, in the end. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, won though everything in her heart told her otherwise. How can people do that?" "Perhaps she did what she could to help." "She was my jailer." "She taught you to survive.

You're not mine to give away. You belong to the tribe." "I don't belong to anyone! I'm not a thing to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me. I'm a woman.

I don't want to be Marghe the anthopologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don't think I am her anymore. But I don't know who I want to be.

She liked time at the edge of things-the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood-where all must pass but none quite belonged.

Belonging was not a seer's wyrd.

Norway: a solid world aganist which to lay myself and make a mask that could be examined, could be held up in comparison with who I used to be, before.

One day, to suit some purpose of their own, her mother or her uncle would pluck her from her life and send her to live in a fen with a man she didn't know. In the world of skirt and sword, it was part of her wyrd. But not all her wyrd, and not yet. There was so much to learn, so much to know.

Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

You have thrown out a signal bright enough to draw any who can hear and see; now they will be clamouring to enter you, to know you, to have you as a bee might climb inside a flower. And like a bee they will strip you bare and leave you heavy will all that makes you who you are.

Sitting in the fire in the summer evening as Hild the daughter of the might-have-been king, not Hild the seer of the overking, speaking nothing but British, she felt her face setting in a new shape, happier, younger.

Light of the world. This was what she knew. This was who she was. Her wyrd had been before she was. She chose this path, this place, because she had always chosen.

Most importantly for me, historical accuracy also meant this could not be a story of only straight, white, nondisabled men. Crips, queers, women and other genders, and people of colour are an integral part of the history of Britain—we are embedded at every level of society, present during every change, and part of every problem and its solution. We are here now; we were there then. So we are in this story.

Her face had been digitally erased and replaced by the star's, but I would have recognized anywhere those shoulders and tight waist, the way she turned like an eel through the air, as though she had all the time in the world.

She will never say what the girl's true name is, or who the other was, and the stories are never the same. And always the cave is hidden.