The Blue Place Quotes

“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

“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

“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, The Blue Place

“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

“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

“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

“Every now and again I go into a school to teach self-defence classes to young women. I ask: How many of you know which way to look before crossing a busy street? And every single hand will go up. So then I ask: Who knows the fire drill? And most of the hands stay up. Even if I ask who knows CPR, or what to do if you smell gas, there are a lot of hands. But if I ask how many know how to walk around a corner properly—or escape a stranglehold, or find out if the man behind you really is following you—they lower their hands in confusion. Yet these are all sensible precautions. It’s just that women are taught to not think about the danger they are often in, or how to prevent it. We’re taught to feel fear, but not what to do about it.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“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, The Blue Place

“All the things that make you you, your clarity and solidity and certainty, come from this. You can actually reach out and touch your past. It’s in the wood, in the cold, clear water of the fjord and the hard rock of the mountain. And the wood and the fjord and the mountain are in you, clear and strong and massive.” She looked at me then, reached out to trace the line of my cheekbone, my nose, my jaw. “Aud, Aud, Aud.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“The people who built these churches understood wood, and they were not in a hurry.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“I breathed in the scent of cloudberry and violet and warm woman.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“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, not find my way back, I wouldn’t want to find my back because it’s seductive.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“When everything shows down and my muscles are hot and strong, and the blood beats in my veins like champagne I feel this vast delight. Everything is beautiful and precious, and so clear. Light gets this bluish tinge and I feel like a hummingbird among elephants, untouchable.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“The troll lives in his bones and walks abroad wearing his skin, even under the sun.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“This country’s bones and flesh are made of rock and its blood is the ice-cold water of glacier melt.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“How had she managed to get inside me, slip between my ribs and rest against my heart without me feeling it?”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“The music was sinuous, insistent. She was moving with it again, swaying silver like a sleeping fish in its current.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“The music was like a living stream, pulsing beneath bodies, collecting thickly in dark corners, vibrating bone so hard it might have been cartilege.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“She looked alert and lithe, a dancer with briefcase in the wrong building.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“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.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“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.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“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.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“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.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“You know what frightened me more than the details? The way you talked about it. Your face was…I’ve never seen anything like it, except maybe some African sculpture. All implacable planes. Almost inhuman. And your voice, harsh as a broken engine. And I looked at you and thought: Oh, that’s what he’ll look like when he comes for me. I’ll just be a thing, a problem to be solved, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve eaten cold’s tongues, or that I really don’t care for akevit, that I like roses even though they have too many thorns, and hot coffee in the morning. I felt inconsequential.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“Her back was straight, she moved with enormous, fragile dignity.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“Promises were useless in the face of torture.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“Death is not something I like to play guessing games with.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“In the dim light, surrounded by swirls of sweet hash smoke, she was as clear as a cut-glass figurine.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place

“As the sun went down and left candlelight wavering over brow and throat, wrist and mouth, it seemed for a moment that they could be almost the same age: two women enjoying a conversation.”
― Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place