Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

It seemed as if I could stand up comfortably in the corridor or service tube or whatever it was, so I did, trying to make sense of how it twisted around at seeming random.

Elena Pretoria was exactly where Lesa had imagined her, on the back veranda with her long hands spread on the arms of a rotten chair-real furniture, not provided by House-her silver-streaked hair stripped into a tail and her skin glowing dark gold against the white lounging clothes.

In a moment, the heat would touch him. Kit braced himself for the pain, tilting his chin down to this chest and imagining that his weight flowed like water through his pelvis and down his legs, anchoring him to the floor.

They were deep within the world, and its hungry latticework structure had consumed the available light.

Kit held his breath as Lucifer came to him, tilted his chin up with a wing-tip touch, wordlessly eased open his tight folded arms with a brush of gentle feathers.

There was the sense of something having been ripped from me; that heartbroken punch of loss without any memories to explain where it was coming from.

He shivered no longer, Mehiel's power warming his shoulders like a feathered cloak.

How would she know, in the end, what was her desire and what was given her?

She could already imagine the dexterity with which Mallory's arched dark eyebrows would rise, and the answer which didn't need saying.

The Devil's lips hovered over Kit's, satin as rose petals, the warm brush of breath on Kit's skin and the warmth of a presence clos enough to stir the fine hairs on his cheeks.

It was almost a clea hate, for a moment, untainted by her own failures.

A few strands of dark hair floated around her face, escaped from his braid, but the five-point restraints kept her firmly in her seat as the shuttle Leonard Cohen matched velocities with the starship and drifted into position along her central axis.

I've got a head so full of dead people I suspect whoever I started off as should be counted as one of them.

Without women in a position to protect them, gentle males would find it rough going in a society dominated by stud males and hormonally driven aggression.

Se was not a greatparent. Se did not have the skill of making luck.

Long tradition of ship's cats in the navy." "This is the air force, Captain." "I won't tell him if you won't.

For all the air of comfort and grace she projected, however, Lesa noticed the white leather of her holster slung over her waist and buckled down to her thigh. Elena had a past as a duelist, too, and as a politician. And she wasn't about to let Claude Singapore forget it, even if Claude's position as prime minister was enough rank to let her enter another woman's household without surrendering her honor.

She'll want to own whomever she names.

Carel, there's a unicorn eating your lily buds.

Sliding across the earth, they seemed small-headed, inoffensive, their eyes like black star sapphires suffused with a silvery overlay of light. Tristen only knew the serpents for what they were because, here and there, one reared up and opened its infamous hood like a flower on an arm-thick stem.

I was too overwhelmed-and too focused on my job and its dangers-to let myself feel overawed.

It would insinuate itself into the artificial personality files and trigger duplication of the data, and carefully controlled growth. Whether anything would come out of it, even the worm's programmer-with his near infinite resources-could not say. It was a gamble as well, but communication, wooing, conception, and procreation always are.

Benedick found irony in his knowledge that the symbiont Cynric herself had created-and inoculated into Benedick by her own hand-was the very thing that allowed Benedick to remember her murder so precisely.

There's blood on my mouth, and through the twisted collar of his shirt I can see a pale handprint darkening where my left hand clenched, somehow not hard enough to break skin, crush bone. My whole body shudders and he pulls me naked into his embrace. I bury my head against his shoulder and I am weeping, am laughing, am shivering in the cold capsule of air.