201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

She felt depressed and uncertain, not yet ready to be alone with her new and fragile thoughts.

The tribe, the tribe, nothing but the tribe. It was all she knew. I just didn’t matter to her, in the end. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, won though everything in her heart told her otherwise. How can people do that?”“Perhaps she did what she could to help.”“She was my jailer.”“She taught you to survive.

I don’t want to be Marghe the anthopologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don’t think I am her anymore. But I don’t know who I want to be.

Vibration seeped through Ollfoss like the smell of grass after rain, resonating with the pulse of the world, its heartbeat.

Long after the sound faded, she sensed the air humming as the gong quivered on its ropes.

She heard the world humming deep in its throat, and when it rang with its soft pulse, she leaned forward to strike the gong.

All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces until the known becomes the only.

The women called to one another, shouted at the stupid beasts that milled in confusion, cursed when one enterprising animal made a run for the open plain. Uaithne’s braids burned in the sun like rivers of hot Irish gold as she chased it and brought it down in a tangle of legs.

The shocked silence of last night had given way to mutterings which had become resignation, then calm acceptance: Uaithne had killed a Brigannon, yes, had plunged them all into a feud with another tribe that might be the death of them all before spring, but she was also Echraidhe, one of them, their sister, and her madness-if it was madness-was bright and proud and beautiful.