Always Quotes

“Women, in short, have been trained to believe that they’re not allowed to be angry.”

“Trained,” Katherine said loudly. “You’re always talking about training, like we’re dogs or something.”

“It’s not polite to raise your voice,” I said, and she immediately hunched and blushed. Suze frowned. “Don’t frown,” I said to her, “you’ll get wrinkles.”

Silence.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“Falling isn’t like any other kind of stunt work. To fall, you have to understand the ground. You have to embrace not being on your feet. […] It’s about letting go. It might sound crazy, but it’s a kind of acceptance. A being right there and a not being there. […] It’s much more than the possibility of being hurt. It might have started out that way, when our ancestors were swinging from trees, but it’s become this whole moral metaphor. A fall from grace. Pride before a fall. Feeling good means you’re up, bad means you’re down.”

“Lucifer’s fall.”

“Exactly. It’s the most basic prohibition of all: Do not fall. It’s drummed into us. We’re not as scared of the landing as we are the falling. Think about it. A fall from thirty feet can kill you just as dead as one from a hundred feet, but fewer stunters will do a hundred feet because it just feels more scary—and that’s because it takes longer to fall.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“When an ovulating woman offers herself to you, she's the choicest morsel on the planet. Her nipples are already sharp, her labia already swollen, her spine already undulating. Her skin is damp and she pants. If you touch the center of her forehead with your thumb she isn't thinking about her head—she isn't thinking at all, she's imagining, believing, willing your hand to lift and turn and curve, cup the back of her head. She's living in a reality where the hand will have no choice but to slide down that soft, flexing muscle valley of the spine to the flare of strong hips, where the other hand joins the first to hold both hip bones, immobilize them against the side of the counter, so that you can touch the base of her throat gently with your lips and she will whimper and writhe and let the muscles in her legs go, but she won't fall, because you have her.

She'll be feeling this as though it's already happening, knowing absolutely that it will, because every cell is alive and crying out, Fill me, love me, cherish me, be tender, but, oh God, be sure. She wants you to want her. And when her pupils expand like that, as though you have dropped black ink into a saucer of cool blue water, and her head tips just a little, as though she's gone blind or has had a terrible shock or maybe just too much to drink, to her she is crying in a great voice, Fuck me, right here, right now against the kitchen counter, because I want you wrist-deep inside me. I hunger, I burn, I need.

It doesn't matter if you are tired, or unsure, if your stomach is hard with dread at not being forgiven. If you allow yourself one moment's distraction—a microsecond's break in eye contact, a slight shift in weight—she knows, and that knowledge is a punch in the gut. She will back up a step and search your face, and she'll feel embarrassed—a fool or a whore—at offering so blatantly what you're not interested in, and her fine sense of being queen of the world will shiver and break like a glass shield hit by a mace, and fall around her in dust. Oh, it will still sparkle, because sex is magic, but she will be standing there naked, and you will be a monster, and the next time she feels her womb quiver and clench she'll hesitate, which will confuse you, even on a day when there is no dread, no uncertainty, and that singing sureness between you will dissolve and very slowly begin to sicken and die.

The body knows. I listened to the deep message—but carefully, because at some point the deep message also must be a conscious message. Active, not just passive, agreement. I took her hand and guided the wok back down to the gas burner. Yes, her body still said, yes. I turned off the gas, but slowly, and now she reached for me.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“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, Always

“Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. For the first time, I understood something about Dornan before he did.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“I could probably beat you at pool.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her golden ear.

“No, you couldn’t.”

“I beat you at darts.”

“We’re getting off the subject.”

“You just hate being beaten.”

“Call it one of my imperfections.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“You have MS. But you’re fit now, as long as you stay cool, and maybe you’ll be able to do stunt work for years. You also leap to conclusions without thinking, you give everything, even trees, their own name, you get weird and don’t talk when you should.” I looked at the oddly bald little bottle in her hand. “And you steal my beer.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“Money shouldn’t frighten people. It’s a tool. A very versatile one.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“You’ve made more of a life here in three weeks than you’ve done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you’ve managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn’t really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandanavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn’t. Ideal for you.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“It was obvious.”

“Maybe to you.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“I ached for them. Most of them would not be able to cling to their bubble world; one day someone, something would thrust it. I wished it could be different.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“She was smiling, an otter playing in a smoky waterfall. My face ached. It seemed I was smiling, too.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“Her smile was warm, her hand pressure brief but sincere, and her makeup flawless.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“Sometimes I think I know you, know who you are deep down, better than you know yourself. You think efficiency is the key to your personality, but it’s not. You’re a sensualist, a hedonist of the first order. Look at the way you cradle that cup, the way you tilt your face to the sun like a flower.”

“It’s efficient. Absorbing heat means my body doesn’t have to create its own.”

“But it’s also delicious.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“The end of the room dripped and glowed an eerie vampire-cavern red. Blood dripped onto the body below, thickly, silently, the drops absorbed by its clothes.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“There is no perfect security. There’s always something. Always.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“Clothed only in a thin silk robe and open to the gaze of the viewer, she remained inaccesible, enigmatic, hidden. Her expression was secretive. It conveyed a sense of someone leading a supremely autonomous inner life yet-and I couldn’t work out how the painter had made this so clear-she was vulnerable. Perhaps it was the eyes, focused far beyond the viewer, or the fact that there were no lines in her face. An innocent, or perhaps a victim past caring. It could have been his hands, one lying on top of the other in perfect repose, or complete resignation.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“In my imagination I smiled back at her, then found I was smiling down at her because she was in a wheelchair.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“She and Eric were not looking at each other, but I could tell that, in the way of some couples, they were intensely aware of each other’s body language and were exchanging a private communication.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“My mother’s soul was still Norwegian in a way that mine was not.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“If I chose Kick, she would accept us without reservation and never remind me of this conversation by word or deed; she would close over it like the ocean over a swimmer’s head.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“When I was young, it was about winning, about making the other do what I want. But sometime in the last ten years…Well, I changed.” She didn’t look at Eric, but I got the impression their feet were touching under the table. “Now instead of charging at people, sword drawn, I find it much more enjoyable and productive to run alongside them, learn their stride and rhythm, whether or not we could run together in the long term.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“She was already going to that place, the heart-stopping moment when the world pauses, the resumes as a crystal dream.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“Dornan gave me a wink, as if to say he saw I was glowing under a bit of flattery as much as anyone else in the room.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“If I’d known that all it took to worm my way into a woman’s heart was to let her beat the shit out of me, my early life would have been different.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“You’d have to be dead to be impervious to that rhythm.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“You terrify me.”

“What?”

“You terrify me,” she said distinctly.

It was like being harpooned.

“I don’t mind the article. I told myself it was okay. It was okay. It is. But it frightens me that you can do that kind of thing anytime you want. You could buy half this city. You can take care of me. You can give me everything I ever wanted, everything I need, everything I might ever have dreamed of but might otherwise be unable to have, now. Because of…” She let go of one arm long enough to gesture to her body, the spine with its bright white lesions. “You offer me a way to have everything, to give up fighting. To just…give it up, give in, go gracefully into that good night. And the frightening thing is, I want to go. I want to never have to lift another finger, never have to worry about money again in my life, but then who would I be?”

“You’d be Kick.”

“No. Because who is Kick? I am what I do. And if it’s all done for me, what’s left?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know. And it’s tempting to let you do it, anyway. But I can’t, because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore, who I am.”

“You are Kick.”

“I was Kick. Before.”

I put the cup down, stood, and lifted the coffee table up and set it to one side out of the way. She watched me. I knelt at her feet. “You are Kick.” I bent and kissed her bare instep. “I know your skin.” I leaned forward, so that my cheek rested on her feet and each of my palms were flat on her hips. “I know the shape of your muscle, the heft of your bone.” I lifted my head. Her eyes met mine. I came to my knees and leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth. “I know your mouth.” I ran my hand over her hair, down the side of her neck. Her pulse beat hard. I know your pulse.” I kissed the other corner. Her lips opened. “I know your breath.” A light, almost not-there kiss, like kissing a butterfly’s wings. “I know your scent. I know you. I always will.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“The way my parents see me, more Crip than Kick, I saw I’ve been doing that to myself. Cutting myself down to size before anyone else could do it.”

“Protecting yourself.”

“Making myself small.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“That’s…”

“An excellent idea. I do have them sometimes. Yes. Now go.”
― Nicola Griffith, Always

“His eyes were hazed with memory, the way I imagined the blue glass of a doll’s might look if it had been left for too long on an abandoned nursery, light streaming pitilessly through bare windows until the cheap glass clouded and cracked. Had he seen Kick’s illness right from the beginning and decided it was too hard?”
― Nicola Griffith, Always