Nicola Griffith > Quotes

“Dogs own space and cats own time.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“She liked time at the edges 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.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and
setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all,
story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*."
--Nicola Griffith,
www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...”
― Nicola Griffith

“Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“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.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who lived on Earth were unaware that they lived on a gigantic gong that boomed out exactly sixty-nine times every day.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you'll wait forever.”
― Nicola Griffith, Slow River

“Being here is like standing at the edge of the sea under a wide sky: clear, open, clean, and bright. Here is where I am meant to be.”
― Nicola Griffith, Spear

“No one but her uncle knew that under Fursey’s tutelage she could make her letters or that she understood Latin if it was spoken slowly—and even he seemed content to let her learn privately. Until she knew how these newcomers thought and what they wanted, she would keep it that way, keep her dice rattling in her cup. It was foolish to throw before all bets were on the table.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“These people were utterly human. But what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“A name, she thinks, is what makes a person who they are. A name is how they know themself.”
― Nicola Griffith, Spear

“Hild fetched a lump of grey salt for Mildburh and mortar and pestle to crush it in. She loved the gritty crunch and thump under her hand. It sounded like a cat eating a bird.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“Even the dead had names.”
― Nicola Griffith, Spear

“She wondered why modern creations became uglier faster.”
― Nicola Griffith, Slow River

“The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach-colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands. Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n’gus, queen daggerhorn sky—stately and slow-moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“there was no power like a sharp and subtle mind weaving others’ hopes and fears and hungers into a dream they wanted to hear. Always know what they want to hear—not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn’t even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.”
― Nicola Griffith, Slow River

“She liked time at the edges 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.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid for what they had done together.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“I've played with adrenalin, almost every dangerous sport you can imagine, but that's not the same as violence, not the same as coming up against someone who wants you dead, where there's no room for one misstep, where it's all or nothing. Feeling that bungee cord whip you up just two seconds from the ground is one thing, looking into the eyes of a man with a knife is another. It's the ultimate competition—there's one life between us, and it's mine. You feel how fine life is. It's a sort of possessiveness. A bit like sex. Just as you can't suddenly rip someone's clothes off in public when you have the urge, you have to train the urge to violence. It's like always singing sotto voce when all you want to do is take a great breath and let it rip. Violence feels good. It's so simple and clear. There's no mistaking the winner. I like it, but I avoid going there, going to the blue place, because I think I could get lost, might not find my way back, I wouldn't want to find my way back because it's seductive.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“All different yet somehow alike-not family but easy with one another and loud, laughing and singing, bright and clean. The same bright, the same clean she remembered from the scent of the promised lake. The girl’s heart soared: a story came alive from legend, knights hunting dragons!”
― Nicola Griffith, Spear

“She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn’t see the pattern. There was a piece missing.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“An Anglisc oath is like water. It pours into every part of you, every crevice. You can’t hold any piece apart from it.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild