201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

People could not be made to change. It had taken her a long time to learn that. People had to want to change themselves.

Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage surging light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration.She was going to do her job. At last.

The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spider-webs across her face and kept wanting to hush it away, wipe it from her skin.

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

It was snowing. Her suit warmed rapidly, and the starvision visor turned the world smoky gray, ethereal, with the snow drifting down in black flakes. The grass was frozen, but she could not hear the crunch of her footsteps: all sound, all vision, all sensation was filtered by her suit. She was isolated from the world, just as though this were one of her first virtual-reality training missions as a cadet.

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.

The arms that Thenike wrapped around her waist for support were strong and hard. Marghe wanted to lean into them and weep for what she had lost, though she did not know whether the loss was good or bad, or even real.

It’s as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there’s nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and the brittle exterior. But I don’t have that job anymore. No shell. But if I don’t have that then what do I have?

She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, snaking heavy and solid into the bones of her hand.