Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

The secret to getting away with lying, is believing with all your heart. That goes for lying to yourself even more so than lying to another

You know," he said, "every time a vampire says he doesn't believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames.

Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.

Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.

If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?

Opinions are like kittens," he commented. "People are always giving them away.

The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point. There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren't paying attention.

She said, "You're a warrior. So how do you kill without rage?" "In compassion. Because of necessity." Hrahima set the empty water bowl back in Samarkar's hands. "The same way you carry water.

The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say "please" and "thank you" same as any mother's son.

My love is not water in a bucket, you know. It's not as if someone else can drink it all up and leave none left for you.

What was a book? Not just ink and fiber and stitchery: a series of processes. To a wizard, it was not a static object--but a human thought caught and bound, made concrete through sacred technology. Magic, then, and a deep form of it.

One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.

There's value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There's no value in work for its own sake.

No one is making me say this. No one is making me tell this story. Nobody's ever been much good at making me say anything I hadn't already made up my mind to say.

She was alive. She was alive, and she had found her power — or it had found her. Tomorrow's problems she'd take care of tomorrow.

The older he got, the simpler the world was revealed to be.

one must come to the understanding in the end that one was always insufficiently practiced, and yet one must sometimes act anyway. Practice itself was an act.

Why didn't you mention how you were feeling?" "Because it's feelings," I said. "And feelings are terrible.

Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.

Djinn," she said. "We go to review the troops. Clothe me as befits a queen." "Silks and satins?" he asked, eyes sparkling like sapphires. "White brocade?" "Armor," she said. "And flame.

I don't want what you want," I said. "And I'm not going to help you. I don't even want to argue with you, because while I know that human beings are capable of assimilating, adopting, internalizing, integrating, and identifying with new sets of ideas—because we have, multiple times in the history of the species—I've discovered that I don't actually care what you think, because you are an awful person and you want awful things.

But Doc knew that was the key to successful lying. People judged what other people would do by what they themselves would do. You could tell a hell of a lot about a man by what he assumed others got up to. If you're looking for a thief, bet on the man who's always accusing his neighbors.

while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.

The words were low, more shape than breath.