Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

For all it was the answer he would have expected her to want, it did not seem to satisfy her.

He scampered across the surface of the virtual timestreams, testing them with palps and toetips, the movement of the spider controlled by the fine twitches of his gloved hands.

Sometimes, even he found his program overly Gothic.

Baines will perform his Black Mass in front of my witness, and I shall own him.

He led her downstairs without releasing her, and that he left the front door unguarded reinforced Muire's deductions about how seriously Cathoair's friends took his disappearance.

The chains hung flashing in the wintry light, the sea combed gray and tired behind them.

At least he's laughing. It sounds as if he might strangle on it, but he's laughing. So help me God.

Strange to have his former apprentice treating with him as an equal now. Strange, and satisfying.

Kusanagi-Jones had only one idea, and it involved doing something he hadn't willingly done in his adult life.

I press my steel hand to my cheek, taking comfort in the coolness of metal.

How subjective the world must have been, then, when no one could remember the same events, and nobody would remember them for long.

Diplomacy amounts to nothing; it all comes down to blood and iron in the end." "Don't misquote Bismark at me.

Mammals, apparently, were pretty funny to a carnivorous plant.

Mallory's face went briefly vague, as those of Exalts could do when they consulted their internal worlds.

Machiavelli's outlook had not been so much simplistic as limited by his times.

Kit hesitated in the half-crumbled archway, the torches failing to illuminate the darkness beyond.

Now, he has the rage of the sun-eater and the sorrow he drank down with Muire's breath, and he is certain of nothing. So he lingers between spaces, liminal, indeterminate, watching for a glimpse of his enemy's face or the face that was never his lover's, and waiting.

You change in my arms and change again, and all I can do is hold you.

The wand carried a spell that paralyzed the target in a kind of stasis, a forensic sorcerer's tool of arrest and self-defense. Sebastien had always presumed, with-he now understood-inadequate evidence-that it left the target insensible. He wished it so now.

You aren't you. You aren't the you you were this morning. Your consciousness provides a semblance of continuity, but if you've been an infinite number between then and now.

The six suits are Cups, Stars, Stones, Blacks, Wires, and Voids.

As you wish, my lady. Keep your crown, and your cruelty. Love me not. I will go.

The Dragon's direct, forward gaze was as intent as any predator's, and meeting it made Vincent very aware that he was small and-mostly-quite soft-fleshed.

I think the flutter of color in my head is Alan's equivalent of a sigh.