Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

And it proceeded to tell me the history of how the Synarche learned to be a patient suitor, because it turns out that making mistakes is how we grow up, whether we're a multi-species alien utopia, or just some dude screwing up their first romance beyond believability.

It came out in his posture, he thought, the way his chin and shoulders lifted. Mallory brought energy into any room.

I was raised in a clade. There is no real me.

He's not a villain," Dorcas said, "He's a hero who happens to be on the other side of the war.

A dark chuckle and the sensation of shifting earth, of a crimson eye splintering darkness, and the presence was gone as suddenly as it had come.

What are kings good for, from the perspective of the common people, except dragging your folk off to fight in other kings' wars?

She wore no iron rings; the city itself pained her.

When has the Light ever been gentle to innocence?

Vincent was brilliant, unconventional, almost protean in his thinking.

Somehow, Kit got the cup to his mouth. Perhaps even the steam was fortifying. It tasted of bitter earth and summer sun and the unshed tears still clogging his throat.

My peace and focus, in any case, had been shattered, and there was no hope now of a steady hand.

We alleviated suffering, and I've lived with enough suffering to know that any time you can take the edge of it, repair it for even one creature, you are creating a net good in the universe.

Unless something remarkable had changed, he wore spiky, kinky sandy-auburn braids a shade darker than his freckled skin and a shade paler than his light-catching eyes.

My rival," he whispered, his lips moving against Cathoair's own as Cathoair tried not to understand. "My sister has excellent taste. What a fragile, beautiful boy thou art.

In any case, Prometheus is in the process of reinvention. I'd like to plead our case.

She was mannishly magnificent, tall and broad-shouldered, with her long stride and her mane of unrestrained mahogany-black curls. She wore boots, and the heels clapped on the rugs unrepentant as a horse's hooves.

In those places where the gold and auburn leaves still cling to the trees and brushes, the dappled shadows moving underneath them formed diminished crescents, layer on layer of moving images.

You let your guard down to one person, pretty soon other people started creeping in over the razor wire and around the force fields, too. And then they inevitably hurt you, and what might have been a few chips and dents of your deflectors were working turned, instead into a full-sledged meteor storm, leaving behind cracked bones and big meaty gauges.

The cold of Faerie magic pierced he warmth of the night; the Seeker's will cast a shadow as she pausd under a streetlight, again chafing her hands.

The thing that willed up inside me wasn't words, exactly. It was…notes, music. A pattern of sounds, or perhaps it would be more accurate to liken it to the recalled memory of sounds, arranged into a pleasing and harmonious whole. As Singer had described it-a song.

Thank thee, Will. In mine extremity, I know I could trust in thee.

Rien had been the beloved of Perceval, and so Nova, too, had loved the Captain beyond the love that Angels had been built to suffer.

Fyodor Stephanovich dominated the room with the careless ease that one would expect of a Prince among wolves.

This was his wood, his mountain.