Menewood Quotes

“She did not bother to answer him. He seemed happy to keep talking and eventually he would answer his own question.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Who are you, Hild Yffing? You read and write, and your priests treat you like a bishop-for they are your priests, Roman and British, that’s plain. But people call you seer and hægtes.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“She had spoken out loud. Or perhaps Bryhtsige had plucked her thoughts from her mind. He seemed otherworldly, his eyes black.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“She wore a short dress with breeches, and with her gold and jewels and corn-coloured hair braided back she rode from the mist with Oeric at her back like a queen of the north before the redcrests came.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“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, Menewood

“Winter war was the ruin of the pattern.

Near the beginning of a new weave, if she felt a flaw through her hands—the hitch in the flow, a tension on the loom as she threaded the shuttle through the warp—she could stop and unpick one row: a moment, a blink, and it was mended. But if she ignored it, if she pretended it was nothing, she would begin to feel each pass of the shuttle, each beat of the weft turn more wrong, until she slowed, closed her eyes, and stopped. Then she must tally the time it would take to undo the weave, and weigh that against the rest of the work to be done.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“perhaps it was that she was now a bowl turned and hollowed by sadness in order to hold more joy.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“she had learnt long ago that a man, even a king, believed not what he said he wanted to hear but what, deep in his secret heart, he yearned to hear.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Her gemæcce could pick people up and put them down again as a child does, without a thought, though any toy she picked up was put down undamaged, and happy to have been played with.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Your power’s not in your gold or your name. It’s in you. I don’t understand it.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Oswald was studying her, and perhaps he had drunk more than she knew because, for the first time, he was not talking care to guard his expression: He was puzzled.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“If there was to be a challenge it would not be from her, or not today.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Unseen behind the edge-cloth, her mother gripped her thigh and shook hard, once, twice, eyes savage with triumph.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“When she felt the hall balanced on the edge of standing and roaring her name, she sat.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Let them look. Let them see her bare arms and her diadem, let them see her strength, her wealth, and her power: Hild Yffing, king maker and king breaker.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“She was Hild. Herself. And she would not be threatened.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“The roar of voices and music from the hall hit her like an enemy charge as she stepped from her apartments.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“This was what it was like to think as a king: to make one throw to win three gains.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Listen to me now and try to hear.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“It feels good to spend the day doing what I’m good at, talking to people who see me for who I am.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“In Hild’s apartments, Brona rolled on her belly, face dewy from their exertions.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“They were the same women they had been, and their bodies fit together the same-better, perhaps, for the absence. But now they were in York, where Brona had lived all her life, and it was different.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Hild stopped, took her mother’s hands in her own; they were rougher, harder than they had been.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“No one understood a word he said, and they ignored him. He grew more and more cross, and so louder and louder.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Begu laughed, a picture of such joy that Hild’s heart ached.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“Gemæcce, I’ll always come to you. No matter what.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“The Fiercesomes had been Edwin’s ugly puppets. Shunned despite their strength and skills. Laughed at. Now they belonged. Now people looked at them and nodded and said, They’re the lady’s men. What more did they need?”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“She imagined the greyish-white eggs cracking and chicks opening bright pink mouths, newly alive in the world while all around them bodies rotted in the sun.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“She was in the world but not wholly of it, as though someone had thinned the skin between this earth and the next.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood

“It should have been a nightmare ride two leagues uphill into the wild dark and slashing rain, with lightning crackling around them, but Hild’s bones fizzled and her heart sang.”
― Nicola Griffith, Menewood