201 Quotes by Nicola Griffith

Death is not something I like to play guessing games with.

Promises were useless in the face of torture.

Her back was straight, she moved with enormous, fragile dignity.

The first thing that caught her eye was one of J.C. Dahl’s huge paintings of fjord light and water. She stood before it and her restlessness dropped away. She became as still as the deep dark of the fjord. I know if I put my hands on her shoulders, they would be soft and relaxed. This was a Julia I had not seen before: distant, analytical, expert.

Mountainside, cloaked in falling straight into water as smooth and reflective as glass. You knew, looking at it, that it was a mile deep. Lush spring flowers, laughing sky. But changeable, and everywhere bones of rock. Good country in summer, but dangerous if approached without caution and, in winter, utterly isolated from the next valley by the mountains suddenly cloaked in ice and mist. Troll country.

She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on the bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow.

I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

No one knew me; there was no one to compare my behaviour in the shop with my behaviour at other times. I could be fluid and responsible only to myself.

She looked alert and lithe, a dancer with briefcase in the wrong building.