Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Baines came up behind him, a hulking form, breathing softly. He smelled of soap and wine and rosewater and lightly of fresh sweat.

Anyway, dissociation is a great coping skill. It can keep you going and functional basically forever. The problems hit when it starts to break down, which is essentially as soon as you start to question your own detachment.

His tone was amused, silky-sweet, but Keith caught the worry under it.

The white tree on the bluff over the ocean was hung with icicles like curtains of glass, creaking faintly in the wind. Morgan's cottage, once they passed through the icy snowless beech wood, was white as bone and black as aged oak among the weathered stems of the garden.

It was his grace and shame, he thought, that he could always find peace and clarity in the midst of ruin.

Abby Irene ran both hands through her hair, strands pulling between the fingers, the insides of her wrist pale as skimmed milk and veined with blue.

It surprised him that his own voice came out a clear, resonant tenor, and not a thready pain-choked whine.

Keith closed his fingers tight on Ian's doublet-thinking that a wolf would grasp a cub so, by the scruff, careful to break the skin-and dragged him into an embrace.

Vincent's loyalty to the job had always been unimpeachable…but Kusanagi-Jones was about to gamble that his loyalty to the partnership would outweigh it.

There," Murchaud said, tapping the cool surface the Darkling Glass. "There's is your cellar, Master Poet, and there is your oubliette." "Not mine, surely.

Yellow poison dots no bigger than the plastic head of a serving pin. A drug used on combat missions, collaquially known as Hammer. He should know exactly how many I have left, as he's supervised by trials.

There's an eagle feather in my pocket and resolution like a fist clenching my chest and on some deep level I'm dead happy I don't know what comes next.

What's the symbolic association between a beast killed by a silver bullet and the moon?

He was paying the immemorial price of apprenticeship: things concealed, games of trust.

A companionable hand on his shoulder made him shiver.

I've no soul to love with, mistress, nor kindness to give. I am of the Fae so old we blur into things that are ancienter still, and I will tell you that there is nothing in me that cares for you.

Fyodor came up behind him, a wolf among wolves, and pressed his body against the boy's narrow back. Vanya moved back, shifting from foot to foot, an anxious whine hovering low in his throat. Ian shivered harder, Keith and Fyodor holding him tight, arms around each other's shoulders, eyes meeting as Ian buried his head in his father's shoulder and folded into the embrace.

Inside the cottage it was as warm as summer, despite the open door-another touch of Morgan's homely magic-and sweet-smelling cakes were baking on the hearthstone, their crusts just golden-brown on the side closest to the coals.

A warrior kind of finality fills me with an emotion I almost don't recognize.

You know, on Earth, the cards had only four suits and each suit has only four face cards. But there are six important directions here in space.

Kit caught the glitter of flirelight on marble, heard the slow drip of water spattering against stone.

Does a Prince of Faerie love a mortal man?" "It's not encouraged.

He's setting you up, Jenny. Damn. Has set you up.

How did I ever live before I had an AI in my brain?