201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

She looked up, expecting Aoifre. It was Uaithne. She leaned against the fence; her hood was drawn and snow clung to her hair. Her skin was creamy, fresh, with a delicate flush of exertion, and very smooth. Her gloves were tucked under her belt, next to her knife. The carving on the bone handle was smooth with use. She smiled.

Marghe was perturbed by her sense of security in Aoife’s presence, recognizing the feeling for what it was: the passing of responsibility for her personal safety from herself to Aoife. That scared her almost as much as Uaithne had.

The dark was many things: the cold, the alien world, the virus, her own fear.

Marghe could feel the words bubble under her tongue like lava.

Sometimes people have to do new things, things that have never been done before. Everything your foremothers did was new once.

When a woman trespasses amongst the stones of the ancestors, she belongs to the Echraidhe. She becomes Echraidhe. Like horse and herd, she belongs to the tribe. Like me, like you.

Her face had the set look Marghe had learned meant she was unhappy.

You’re not mine to give away. You belong to the tribe.”“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.

The people had abducted her, submerged her in the timeless otherworld that was no more real than the underwater palaces of those other abductors, the Sidhe, the unearthly faerie who stole human children, twisted their souls from their bodies, and filled them instead with dark glamour. Nothing was real.