201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

His rookies had once been more than entries in a ledger, cogs in his cost-effectiveness machine. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him shout or laugh. I failed. Twenty years in the police force had killed everything, bit by bit: his ambition, thin his passion, then his wife.

I was walking, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

I kissed her, and stroked the soft planes of flank and thigh, teased with a fingertip and breath and gaze, and when she shuddered like a kite on a long line, when she began to whip and plunge, when she begged me, I turned her and steadied her and let her loose.It was always the same. They flew and I flew, but to different places.

Your eyes are different in this light. No colour at all. Like cement.

I looked at my hands, turned them over in the tarnished shine of streetlights seeping through a crack in the curtains. They were long; strong and competent with nicely shaped nails; hard enough for a palm strike, soft enough to trace gentle arabesques on a taut trembling stomach or along a soft inner thigh. The stains did not show.

Angst was for the dark.

Here on her own turf she looked different: more whole and competent; denser somehow.

I’ve heard horror stories of Old Masters wrapped in newspapers and arriving with ghastly copes of the funnies imprinted on a stately old forehead.

This was the kind of work I understood. I knew where wood came from, that for every tree cut down, another was planted, that I could make a chair both functional and beautiful. I was adding to the world, not taking.