Top 50 Nicola Griffith Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.”

— Nicola Griffith

2. “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?”

— Nicola Griffith

3. “Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.”

— Nicola Griffith

4. “Dogs own space and cats own time.”

— Nicola Griffith

5. “Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples split over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish.”

— Nicola Griffith

6. “Her cheeks were hectic, brown eyes brilliant, and not only from the cold. Women have lit up that way for thousands of years when they have found someone they want, someone whose belly will lie on theirs heavy and soft and urgent, whose weight they welcome, whose voice thrills them, whose taste, scent, turn of the head makes them thrum with need, ring and sing with it. They laugh. They glow.”

— Nicola Griffith

7. “There is one thing Margaret Thatcher said that I agree with: if you have to tell people you’re important, you’re not.”

— Nicola Griffith

8. “The cloud cover was heavy and multilayered, shades of slate blue and silver, pearl and charcoal, like a sketch washed with watercolour.”

— Nicola Griffith

9. “She walked the spiral corridor, running her hand along the painted horizon – sea, beach, dunes, woods, moors – the journey of her people from over the sea. The story of the Anglisc, woven with Woden back to the dawn of their songs. Ships. Fire. Bright swords. Kin and kine. Woods and wold. Hearth and home. Where was Christ in this? Christ didn’t fight. Christ didn’t farm.”

— Nicola Griffith

10. “We never spoke of it but we knew that to come within the orbit of each other’s skin-scent and cellular hum could end only one way: falling helplessly, spectacularly into the other’s gravity well, momentarily brilliant like all falling stars, but doomed, because I loved Rose. And this friendship was too precious to burn.”

— Nicola Griffith

11. “She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid for what they had done together.”

— Nicola Griffith

12. “Hild fetched a lump of grey salt for Mildburh and mortar and pestle to crush it in. She loved the gritty crunch and thump under her hand. It sounded like a cat eating a bird.”

— Nicola Griffith

13. “It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.”

— Nicola Griffith

14. “Hwl’s thumping began to slow as her cream turned to butter.”

— Nicola Griffith

15. “Not knowing the right definitions is no different from not having the right tools to fix a burst water pipe.”

— Nicola Griffith

16. “You’re like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good.”

— Nicola Griffith

17. “I want to write about grown-up things.”

— Nicola Griffith

18. “There are no commandments against love,” he said.”

— Nicola Griffith

19. “Beeches were rare north of the Humber, and she loved the way they whispered in the wind, like women before they fell asleep.”

— Nicola Griffith

20. “Wind swept dark tatters across a sky rippling with luminous cloud from horizon to horizon like a well-muscled torso, bringing with it the smell of dust and grass and a sweetness she could not identify.”

— Nicola Griffith

21. “Love wasn’t a state change. Romance might be, and lust, and like, but they were just the preconditions. Love was the choice you made; day in, day out.”

— Nicola Griffith

22. “She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?”

— Nicola Griffith

23. “Exposed meant conspicuous, different, not fitting in, not feeling at home, at least not until you learn that your self is your home and no one can take it away.”

— Nicola Griffith

24. “The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like bluewhite cats-o’-nine-tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core.”

— Nicola Griffith

25. “She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.”

— Nicola Griffith

26. “I sipped the coffee. It was delicious, perfectly prepared, as I imagine anything prepared by Annie Miclasz would be. One of those formidable women who felt they had to hide their efficiency behind a soft, caring front; who hid for so long that the front became real; one of the women who kept the world turning; one of the women it paid to never, ever cross.”

— Nicola Griffith

27. “She wondered why modern creations became uglier faster.”

— Nicola Griffith

28. “When you fight to be taken seriously, you don’t smile in photos.”

— Nicola Griffith

29. “Behind her smile, her thoughts whirred like a pole lathe, back and forth, shaving the layers.”

— Nicola Griffith

30. “Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.”

— Nicola Griffith

31. “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.”

— Nicola Griffith

32. “The childlike thing sitting on a cygnet-coloured gelding with a silvered saddle and wearing a brooch worth a son’s ransom must be the princess niece with a reputation as a seer and sorceress.”

— Nicola Griffith

33. “We are more than half of humanity. We are not imitation people, or chameleons taking on protective male coloration, longing for the day when men go away and we can return to being our true, insectlike selves. We are here, now. We are just like you.”

— Nicola Griffith

34. “Whenever we come to a new place, I waylaid strangers and dragged their stories and songs and jokes from them before they ever had a chance to find out my name.”

— Nicola Griffith

35. “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

— Nicola Griffith

36. “Even the dead had names.”

— Nicola Griffith

37. “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?”

— Nicola Griffith

38. “She said nothing, hoping her silence would goad him into explaining.”

— Nicola Griffith

39. “A name, she thinks, is what makes a person who they are. A name is how they know themself.”

— Nicola Griffith

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

— Nicola Griffith

41. “Your mother has built you a place where you can speak your word openly. Now she asks you to use that for her, and for yourself of course.”

— Nicola Griffith

42. “She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn’t see the pattern. There was a piece missing.”

— Nicola Griffith

43. “When she thought at all, she thought in British, the language of the high places, of wild and wary and watchful things. A language of resistance and elliptical thoughts.”

— Nicola Griffith

44. “Life is what makes love, life is what makes grief and happiness, hunger and rage. While you breathe there is life, and while you live there will always be more. Like the stream, love flows without end. Sometimes strong, sometimes slow, but always coming back.”

— Nicola Griffith

45. “She could speak if she chose, but she was not ready to choose because she did not understand.”

— Nicola Griffith

46. “Life, death, change, they happened most at the edge of things: where forest meets clearing, air meets water.”

— Nicola Griffith

47. “These people were utterly human. But what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.”

— Nicola Griffith

48. “All different yet somehow alike-not family but easy with one another and loud, laughing and singing, bright and clean. The same bright, the same clean she remembered from the scent of the promised lake. The girl’s heart soared: a story came alive from legend, knights hunting dragons!”

— Nicola Griffith

49. “She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned her snakestone over and over. She found it helped her think.”

— Nicola Griffith

50. “She liked time at the edges of things – the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood – where all must pass but none quite belonged.”

— Nicola Griffith