Stay Quotes

“You were protecting yourself. You wrapped yourself in armor and pretended to be invulnerable. Growing up inside that armor twisted you a bit out of true, but it doesn’t matter. The essentials are all there.”

She searched my face.

“The armor’s getting too small, Aud. You have to choose.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“A week ago, this part of the river, where trees on each side of the bank touch and merge overhead to form a living tunnel, had been a green-and-black oil painting of dark water and moss-backed boulders. Now it was as though some vandal had hurled cheap emulsion at the canvas: the arterial red leaves of a low-lying maple branch streaked violently from one bank to another, and on the far side, little poplar leaves the exact color of twenty-four carat gold lay strewn over the boulders like pirate treasure.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“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, Stay

“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, Stay

“If you don’t sleep, you don’t dream.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Sunshine and musk and dusty violets, but so faint. I breathed again: her skin, and her hair, oh dear god her hair…Tears ran down my face, my neck, dripped on my hands onto her shirt. All I had left of her. So faint. So very faint.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“When she climbed out of the car, I saw the difference, the sleekness, her buttocks as ripe as mangoes, her arms and legs plump and muscled.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“He looked so small and wounded in his bright jacket that I opened my arms and pulled him in. He wrapped his hands around my hips, leaned his forehead on my breastbone and wept. He smelled of woodsmoke and tea.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Hjordis’s house in Oslo is filled in the afternoons with sunlight. In the evenings and during winter she burns a score of candles to soften and lift the dark that flattens even the best artificial light. Her living room feels alive; it seems to dance. By contrast, the Carpenters’ front room, with its thick brown curtains, umber wool rug, and heavy furniture, felt stiff and formal, but Hjordis would have understood immediately the ritual aspects of the gathering; to the right of the fireplace, Jud sat in a wingbacked chair turned slightly to face the upholstered sofa, where I sat in a carefully nonconfrontational pose, briefcase tucked out of sight. Adeline’s chair faced Jud’s across the fire, turned to give him all her support.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Aud rhymes with cowed.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Her tenderness was unbearable. She was nine years old. She knew how to kiss me better: a simple thing, but one I could never have taught her. And I had come here to save her.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Shift your balance and everything changes.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Watching in dumb show and from a distance made the whole thing look like some strange strange puppet performance, utterly divorced from me and my life.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“She turned her head slightly, to examine me out of each eye, as though each saw a different world but only one could be trusted.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Her bright red lipstick couldn’t hide the fatigue in her smile.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“I thought of all the households in this country that would rejoice at a child’s ferocious need to learn, of the fact that this book had been hidden away, and wanted to push Adeline Carpenter’s face into the stew to boil along with her dumplings!”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“It was the kind of kitchen where a lot of family conversations happen.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“You’re not broken, you’re grieving. You’re grieving because you can feel. No, your mother didn’t love you, and yes, you pretended you didn’t care, but pretending didn’t make it true.”

“Then-“

“Don’t be dense. You were protecting yourself. You wrapped yourself in armor and pretended to be invulnerable. Growing up inside that armor twisted you a bit out of tune, but it doesn’t matter. The essentials are all there.”

She searched my face.

“The armor is getting too small, Aud. You have to choose.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“She reached out as if to touch me and for a second I thought I felt her fingers on my cheek, then realized I was crying.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“You left me. And when you come back, instead of helping me, you say I’m a borderline, not a real person inside.”

“I didn’t call you a borderline-“

“‘Who does he remind you of?’ you said.”

“-I asked you to ask yourself, honestly, how you used to see yourself, before you met me.”

“Before you came along and worked your magic and turned me into a real human being?” It came out sounding half angry, half desperate.

“You know better than that.”

“I don’t know what I know anymore. I’m so…Everything’s changed.”

“You’ve changed. That’s what I wanted you to realize the other night.”

“What if I want to change back?”

Her smile was sad. “Doesn’t work that way.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“A new Tammy, the tentative beginnings of a new life. But there were still a few threads from the old that needed to be dealt with.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Remember when you asked me why I didn’t hit Geordie? It was because I don’t know how. That little girl in Arkansas doesn’t, either. You do. I know that.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Aud?” She touched my hand to make me look up. “I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

“You didn’t,” I said tiredly. “Dornan did. Or Julia did, by dying. Or maybe I did, by loving her. It’s all connected.” Irony is rarely amusing. “Just one big happy human ecosystem, like the woods, with some trees trying to grow too fast and smother the rest.”

“And you’re the axe,” she said.

The fire popped. An axe, cold and unlovely. “Is that how you see me?”

The old Tammy would have smiled and said, No, of course not! and tried to reassure and soothe my ruffled feathers, but though a fleeting regret showed in her sigh, she nodded. “You can use an axe to bang in nails, but that doesn’t make it a hammer. It’s still an axe. Cutting is still what it’s made for.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“Stay in the world, she had said, and this was the world I had made.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“I don’t want to be here alone. I want you to stay.”

“People don’t stay just because you want them to.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“The wine was warm now from being by the fire, its taste as rounded and familiar as the roof of my mouth. It would be very easy to just to finish this bottle, then start another one, sleep soundly, and get up in the morning and go about my business rebuilding the cabin, pretending to turn it into a home.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“It didn’t matter about Luz. She was nothing to do with me. Sending money was all I needed to do. More. I hadn’t put her with the foster parents in Arkansas. I didn’t have to help her, or any of the others-because, oh, suddenly it was so clear that there were others. Many, many others.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“It’s easy to lie to people you’re leaving.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“To not being nine years old and at the mercy of the world.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay

“To learning experiences, even though they suck.”
― Nicola Griffith, Stay