201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

I’m not a vampire. If you invite me in, you can always get rid of me later.

Autumn, like grief, changes everything.

You’re like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he’d done to me.

I sipped, and the hot liquor eased the pain in the center of my chest, warmed the unfallen tears, made me long to bury my face in a woman’s hair. In Julia’s hair.

Good surveillence and good books don’t mix.

After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn’t see people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way and he wouldn’t notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit.

For the next hour and a half I watched him flirt indiscriminately with men and women, couples and groups and singles, flashing out that smile, hooking them in, dismissing them after a sentence or two when it became clear he could have them if he wanted.

They look normal, but they don’t feel a goddamn thing, don’t know happy from sad from a hole in the ground. They walk around smiling and frowning and pretending to feel shit, and think everyone else out there is pretending, too. No one’s real to these guys, you know what I mean? I don’t mind telling you, Torvingen, they scare the crap out of me.

Geordie Karp hurt people and manipulated them because they weren’t real to him. He acted as if he were human, but he was a monster.