Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Spooky," I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.

Eavesdropping's a sin, but ignorance is fatal. Take your pick.

Them as work hardest get no respect for it – women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics – and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day's labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family's bellies is all about.

I liked her scowl and I liked her freedom to wear it.

Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn't make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.

But wasn't that part of a whore's job? Being the sort of ear that lonely men could turn to? I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. —QUENTIN CRISP

It's comforting when God lets you get away with something once in a while. And a little unnerving. You start to wonder what he's got set up for you next and why he's softening you up, like.

May I know your name, sir?" The smile rearranged his face under the terrible scars. "Nezahualcoyotl. Michel Nezahualcoyotl. Charmed.

Let us go hurtling around the galaxy thwarting evil, shall we?

If there was one vice his old masters could smell out from a thousand li away, it was thinking too well of yourself. Or the other form of vanity that was thinking too little. *

The world stood pinned on two thorns. One was ugliness. One was beauty. The truth did not lie in the middle or at either extreme. The truth encompassed both. *

Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we're basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us.

Girls in my profession know a little too much about men. The ones who want to know a woman as a person are fewer than you'd hope, and most of those don't even realize it about themselves. They don't care who a woman is, or what she's scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear.

The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.

Impatience and cutting corners: it's the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.

If you have to die [...] better to go down fighting. Better to die in company. Better not be the last, and alone, weighed down with all that knowing.

Some things are just universal. Like the known scientific fact that the colder and wetter you are, the better bacon smells frying.

Anyway, one of the first things you learn in space is not to thrash. If you have nothing constructive to do, the most constructive thing you can do is often nothing at all. In a mindful sense, I mean. Thrashing is the thing that gets people killed. Not sitting still.

Maybe all obligate carnivores are essentially the same. Can I eat that? Is it going to eat me? Is it a toy?

You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.

So it is with all beauty," she said cheerfully. "Every glory also shits.

The way I saw it, nobody thought the worse of a man who followed his pecker anywhere it sniffed, like a droopy-faced hound dog led on by his nose. So why a woman did the same should be judged different… well, women always is.

The more swiftly we proceed, the less time the enemy has to plan." "Do glass demons think?" "Under the circumstances, it's safest to assume they're up there drawing tactical maps in full relief." "Your argument has merit,