Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

The devil smiled: a slight man, unassuming, his hands knotted in the pockets of his beautiful coat.

The anxiety was bad. The sense of all the ways things could go wrong loomed intensely over me, congealed in a breathless knot behind my sternum. And I kept coming up with new ones.

Like her sister ships, the Montreal has a fatal attraction to gravity wells.

Vincent Katherinessen, the Old Earth Colonial Coalition's velvet-gloved iron hand, for too field-effective to the categorized as a mere diplomatic envoy no matter how his passport was coded.

Tristen shook his head, his white hair shedding snowflakes as if it were made of snow itself.

I don't think you'll get much argument that my personality could use amending.

Loose crimson trousers wrapped her lower body, her bracelets and necklaces tinkling like glass bells as she breathed.

Sorry doesn't cut it in my world. Pay me back, or get the hell out of my life.

She stands and quaffs her drink as well, and lays down the horn. She places one hand on his shoulder and one on mine. Her nails graze my neck. A shiver follows.

She remembered the tarnished, their perverted kiss, and how their victims, even spared would return to be taken again.

They build narratives to make things make sense. To make whatever they're thinking of doing seem normal.

Perceval had been slow in forgiving herself for her lost loved ones and enemies, and slower in forgiving the new Angel so forged in the exigencies of her birth.

Perfidious candle-flicker," he said in a hush. "Remember me.

He was distantly aware that he whined like a child and fussed at the tender hands restraining him, while voices gentle, cajoling, and bitterly frustrated by turns spoke over him.

this community would never be what I wanted. Too many other people wanted it to be different things. It would always have to be a compromise between my ideals and theirs.

Vincent, whom Kusanagi-Jones had managed to avoid for the duration of the voyage by first taking to cryo-damn the nightmares-and then restricting himself to the cramped comforts of his quarters…whom he could avoid no longer.

I think the real reason you're such a goody-two shoes is because this is your Judicially constructed personality. The you you know is Judicial Recon, because you were a juvenille when what happened, happened. So they gave you a clear slate and a clean bill of health.

He smiled to himself, and quickly dropped his head to hide that smile behind his hood and the fall of his hair. If his own work wouldn't do to hold him together through this, he knew the play that would.

The atmosphere of money enfolded Peese like cling film when he entered Jane's apartment. It coated his skin, thick and silken; it slid down his throat like buttermilk. It intimidated. It was meant to.

Rien thought she was speaking to comfort herself as muc as to comfort Rien, and found that, in itself, strangely…well, comforting.

A strange twilight strangled the city's voice to desperate murmurs as every foot paused, every voice hushed, every eye lifted and quickly fell again, unable to bear the light of even a half-occluded sun.

I stamp out the flames, the mtal sprays from beneath my boot, falling, freezing in the shape of a splash, red cooled to silver, still too hot for human touch.

This is as close to an act of love as thou wilt ever taste.

I don't want to think what might have Col. Frederick Valens running scared.