201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

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.

Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you'll wait forever.

The mirror showed a face with wild eyes and skinned-back lips, the face of a fox gone mad.

I touched my reflection with a fingertip. My reflection felt nothing. That’s what I wanted from the world, to feel nothing. To feel nothing and not be involved, for everything to stay comfortably outside myself and not get in. How did people survive all this knowledge of suffering in the world? How did they carry it around, day after day, and not go mad? And what would I wear tomorrow?

Be present, stay alert: the first rule of self-defense. But then I wouldn’t be able to shut out the noise and stink and tension around me.

If you adjust your conscious filters to the appropriate setting, you can relax and let your subconscious take care of things. It’s something I used to be good at.

If you walk as though your mind is easy, your mind believes your body and becomes easy. If your mind is easy, your body believes it and becomes easy: a basic feedback loop.

It would be so easy-my right hand on his right wrist, pull and step, left arm across his throat, whirl and spread my arms, like a dance, and he would drop spine-down over my thigh, snap: less than three seconds, start to finish-but a broken boy would help nothing.

She swung her hair back from her face and eyed me sullenly, now the perfect teenager. Infant to child to teen in one day. With any luck she’d be dead of old age before we reached the clearing.