Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

A woman in the West? You show me one who doesn't drink, and I'll show you one that wants to.

Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.

We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.

So why a woman did the same should be judged different … well, women always is. Judged different, I mean.

Women have more of that patience, as a class. That ain't because we're born with it, though. It's because we're schooled to it and taught early that if we don't have it we won't never win.

Samarkar wondered at what point in a relationship it was appropriate to threaten to break a suitor's kneecaps if he should prove insufficiently respectful of one's friend. The

Being a growed woman, it turned out, was harder work than it looked. But that's a thing, too, ain't it? 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.

So I am going to trust you. I want you to know that if it turns out you're playing me, I'm going to spend the whole endless time the black hole is spaghettifying both of us being extremely disappointed in you.

The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals. It's who we are when nobody is looking.

For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools.

I don't know if it was the excitement that did it, but by the time we started our tiptoe across the icy, rutted skid yard to that shed Priya had quit shivering, but I was trembling like a marriage license in a young man's hand.

And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.

Friends don't keep score." Because friends don't have to keep score, my da would of said. Friends just pitch in as needed, as they can.

Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when they speak the truth they are not believed::

The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.

Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge the existence of abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can - social, biological, what have you.

Angelo," he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia - the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain - and waking.

Most of the people who fail in what they want to accomplish do so because they underestimate who they are. When they don't believe they can succeed at something, they have little chance.

The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.

The harpy smiles. A harpy's smile is an ugly thing, even seen edge-on. The harpy says, You do not have the power to make me not alone, Desiree.

Jeoffry lays back his ears and continues to creep, as the Moppet showed him. she had said,

The tactic seemed to work, so he stuck to the same theme for the next few days, but there was only so much cryptography he could teach before it started squeezing out everything else.

Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.

You'd never break this one. You'd never even bend her. She'd die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile.