Elena > Elena's Quotes

“I am sorry that the only way we have been taught to heal is to hurt.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Femme in Public

“It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you. You no longer need the people at school telling you not to dress like that; you already do it to yourself.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“we have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set us free”
― Alok Vaid-Menon

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll

“Bend down, bend down. Excess is the only ease,
so bend. The sun is in the tree.
Put your mouth on mine. Bend down
beam & slash, for Dread is dreamed-up-scenes
of what comes after death. Is being
fled from what bends down in pain.
The elbow bends in the brain, lifts the cup.
The worst is yet to dream you up,
so bend down the intrigue
you dreamed. Flee the hayneedle in the brain's
tree.
Excess allures by leaps. Stars burn clean. Oriole bitches and gleams. Dread is the fear of being
less
forever. So bend. Bend down and kiss
what you see.”
― Stan Rice

“Like a Wife

The week before my wedding, my friend's dad
said: just don't get fat, like other wives do.

And so I brined him in a deep salt bath, added
thyme and celery. Devoured him whole, in one
big bite, so he could see just how hungry a
woman can be.”
― Kate Baer, What Kind of Woman: Poems

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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