Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

The mantid was one of those creatures you could just hand around with, not saying anything and not notice the quiet because it felt natural.

Fortunately for terrible spies, most people are terrible observers.

Nothing makes a first impression like turning up shitfaced.

He closed his eyes and leaned into the poetry as he leaned into the cloths that bound him, and his lips moved slightly.

Serve your own self for a while.

The red wolf blurred and retreated, a smooth, reshaping of form that left him standing, nude, facing her. Seeker bit her lip and kept her gaze an his eyes, telling herself the breathless pain she felt was nothing but nervousness.

A faint shudder ran through the ship when we dropped out of white space into reality.

Her scent wreathes round my head. Musk, and a field of pungent flowers. Heady, not sweet.

Kit took a deep breath, and walked into the light.

She hasn't forgiven me for getting her wife ousted from the Export Board, and she still thinks the Coalition can be appeased.

He remembered more of being human than the humans did.

Continuity of experience is an illusion, old man.

Her lips were lacquered red as the rubies waved through her hair like frozen blood, and diamonds set in platinum glittered in her ears and on her wrists and at her throat, cold as a frost-hardened dew.

Once you signed the contract, you would never be alone again.

Whatever he was before, he's but a candle-flicker now. A beautiful one, polished and glossy, all the more perfect for the terrible, disfiguring scar that puckers and knots the right side of his face when he smiles. It doesn't seem to bother the young man's admirers; if anything, the wolf thinks some of them find it erotic. The boy shies away like a startled horse, an animal he will never see when women and men wonderingly brush the raw-lipped pink line.

It was such an arrogant, audacious plan. Exactly the sort of thing Vincent would come up with, really.

Once they get you to laugh the fight is over, because no matter how mad you are, nobody takes you seriously when you're trying to dress them down while giggling.

His black robes rustled as he turned, and Will fought the ridiculous urge to step behind Kit like a child twisting him in his mother's skirts.

My identity, my selfhood. The person I'd been for nearly twenty ans. It dropped away, and I was left wrecked and retching, cramped, choking up a thin stream of bile.

Good Goth girls knew these things. Good comparative religion grad students knew them, too.

Nothing could touch Will in the void: he knew somehow that he needed poetry, needed the power of his words, but in his jumbled consciousness he could not put one line of a poem with another.

When you can sound like anything you like, why not sound like something pleasant?

When Morrow called Closs, it was a cause for concern. When she called him at home and didn't waste time on pleasantries, it was nearly a cause to panic.

The walls of Her office were cinder block and limpid shatterproof, offering a panoramic view of Eilidon's rooftops and towers.