Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

He drew a long, slow breath, tasting mold and wet upon it, and shaped the well-loved words.

His wild dark hair, though glazed into ringlets, had defeated whatever product he'd worked through it, and the curls tumbled over his forehead to brush his brows.

Sometimes he thought he plunged through darkness eternally and heard nothing but the Devil's amiable laughter, and knew nothing but the heat of his own Hell.

A voice for a moment he mistook for his own defiant tones, the spiked irony he saved for moments of abject vulnerability.

It takes more than blood and iron to wound me.

I was starting to realizee that we, all of us-Synarche, pirates, Jothari, even the Ativahikas-were living in the ruins of the Koregoi's enormous and shadowy house.

Ah, hell. And this ship has kids onboard. Kids not much older than Leah. Kids the same age I was when I signed in on to this man's army.

Even given my limited knowledge of the vast span of Terran history, terrible crimes seemed terribly commonplace and didn't usually lead to enlightenment.

It wasn't our place to judge them. It was our place to save them.

It's always comforting to see the return of normalcy, and that the system has not completely broken down.

Vincent's gift, the empathy, the sympathy that turned them from men into a team.

I used to make people like you as servants.

Swing hard; follow through to the other side of whatever you are swinging at. Zanya Farweather had been swinging at my soul.

Two decians later, we didn't have any answers, but we'd kind of gotten used to having the not-a-parasite around. And we were still calling it the not-a-parasite, even though it had proven pretty useful.

I would back away growling. Wer I not a man. Or the masquerade of one.

O'Mara sparkled with humor, a disconcerting expression on such a solid lump of a human form.

If she were to be Exalt, one of these arrogant cryptic beings, it semed unfair that she did not have wings.

Shared breath brought tumbling memories, salty bittersweet jewels.

Deep-set eyes glittered like mica chips on either side of a scar-bridged gypsy nose, and straightened and smiled as Keith and Eoghan entered.

Christian smiled the sort of smile that vampires might affect, to hide their fangs.

I would back away growling. Were I not a man. Or the masquerade of one.

A voice like brushed silk, and there would be no mistaking this one for his own, or for that of Mehiel.

The boy who was Strifbjorn is a whore. It's an irony the wolf should be prepared to savor, before he leaves the boy to his fate.

I could mess up the gravity and get squished. I could get sealed in and spend the rest of my objectively quite short but subjectively probably very long and unhappy existence like a jellyfish in the tubes, drifting along, unable to get out. And both of these seemed preferable in my head to the idea that I was going to have to climb out of this accessway and go get into a physical confrontation with somebody who was armed and didn't mind conflict in the slightest.