3
" Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from. "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
5
" I hit someone."
"Yes." I stopped four feet away.
She shook her hand at her side, lifted it, looked at it. "I hit him. He came down the stairs and I hit him. I really hit him. I've spent years wondering if I could, wondering what I'd do if it happened to me, if I'd been the one in front of that theatre...." She looked at her hand again, fascinated. "I hit him, and he ran away."
The realization of what she had done, the exhilaration of her own strength rushed into her, like champagne rushing to fill lead crystal. She shimmered with it, she fizzed. I wanted to lift her in both hands, drink her down, drain her, feel the foam inside me, curling around heart, lungs, stomach.
I stepped closer. She lifted her chin. Closer still.
"Wolf eyes," she whispered, and I could feel her breath on my throat, "so pale and hungry. "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
6
" I've played with adrenalin, almost every dangerous sport you can imagine, but that's not the same as violence, not the same as coming up against someone who wants you dead, where there's no room for one misstep, where it's all or nothing. Feeling that bungee cord whip you up just two seconds from the ground is one thing, looking into the eyes of a man with a knife is another. It's the ultimate competition—there's one life between us, and it's mine. You feel how fine life is. It's a sort of possessiveness. A bit like sex. Just as you can't suddenly rip someone's clothes off in public when you have the urge, you have to train the urge to violence. It's like always singing sotto voce when all you want to do is take a great breath and let it rip. Violence feels good. It's so simple and clear. There's no mistaking the winner. I like it, but I avoid going there, going to the blue place, because I think I could get lost, might not find my way back, I wouldn't want to find my way back because it's seductive. "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
8
" Think about two young adults who go to college. One is brilliant, a genius who floats above her colleagues like a cirrus cloud, the other is merely a plodder: dogged, determined, competent. Throughout their education, the genius has always been able to leap obstacles as though they’re not there while the plodder has, through necessity, learned patiently to climb walls. One day, say in the second year of their Ph.D. programme, that genius will come across a wall so high even she can’t jump it. But she doesn’t know how to climb. The plodder, on the other hand, rubs his hands, checks his equipment, and starts hammering in the first piton. Who do you think will reach the top first? "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
9
" Imagine a blood orange, torn open, and a highly polished mahogany desk. Smear one over the other and add a wash of light blue: dawn over Ireland; rich, unearthly colours that reached past my eyes and stole part of my soul. People were not designed to see such things. I felt the cellular hum of four hundred people as they dreamed or worried or rehearsed speeches in their head in this steel and aluminium shell thirty-three thousand feet over the sea, hurtling through air that is just that, thin air, and knew we were remote from the world, separate, aloof, supported by nothing but speed and physical laws I could recite but have never really believed. "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
13
" What kind of car did Michael Honeycutt, banker, drive? What did he look like, how did he sound? I wanted to see him, to weigh the fabric of his suit, smell his cologne, judge his haircut, watch his body language, listen to the way he shaped his vowels. "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
20
" We steadied each other for a moment-long enough for me to catch the expensive scent of her dark, rain-wet hair-then stepped back. Looked at each other. About five-seven, I’d say. Slim and sleek. Face smooth with wariness: after all, I’m big; I’m told I look frightening when I want. And that made me think how fragile she was, despite the hard muscle I had felt under my hand. It would be so easy-a step, a smile, swift whirtl and grab and snap: done. I even knew how she would fall, what a tiny sound her last sigh would be, how she would fold onto the pavement. Eight seconds. "
― Nicola Griffith , The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen, #1)
