Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Ian looked around for intervention, but he was used to following orders, and used to obeying a queen.

Sometimes it helps to remind them you're not a drone.

My pain's down 63 percent, my reflexes have actually improved, and I can sleep through the night without drugs for the first time in twenty years. Is that what you wanted to hear?

The boy still smells like Strifbjorn.

Clade upbringings fuck you up on so many levels, when you finally let the oppressive rightminding go and try to exist as an independent human being with things like judgment and will.

Oh, she was good at those sidelong glances, and sharp as a tack.

The pain in him might have been my own.

Kit bumped Matthew with his shoulder, the way, once upon a time, he might have nudged another friend.

Funny story, but the coincidence of our last names ending in the same letter is what led two such disparate types as Connla and myself to meet and team up in the first place. It's a long story involving being sorted onto the same team for a pub quiz.

She could no longer thrust her hand into living flame and cup it like water, from palm to palm.

Sometimes a thing can be true, and not for immediate sharing. That was, Connla had assured me more than once, how diplomacy worked.

He limped into its cramped spaces like a wind into a cavern, so constrained by its limits that even his shredden self would not entirely fit and still more rags and tendrils had to be shred, cut away by the Procustean limits of this metaphysical form.

She wanted behind me, rattling her chain impatiently like a ghost of old guilt issues.

We used to call ourselves Team Zed. It sort of fell out of use after we had built up a decan of better reasons to feel like a family, but it still gets a wink and a grin every once in a while.

There was something tremendously comforting in having an adult appear and take care of things, Perceval admittd, watching the tall white man stir dinner with curious focus.

Seeker saw something sorrowful in the line of the Queen's neck and shoulders, but she poked her old rotten hatred up hot and burned whatever scrap of pity might have followed the thought.

She raised a hand imperiously, fingers balled loosly into a fist, and her eyes were not on Will's but on the raven's black ones.

If you can't be good, be careful.

He looked so terribly young, a slender boy with a boy's narrow shoulders and his father's, green, green eyes.

It all came out on a rush, which was probably a mistake, I reckoned, looking at their faces. I should of been chewing on my words some, so everybody else would have had a better chance of swallowing them.

Well, one of the things you learn about sharing a small space with strong personalities you can't escape from is to practice your boundaries even if you'll never be really good at them.

Truth, but not very much of it, suitable for paddling your toes in.

Will told himself a raven could not smirk.

Gentle wasn't the right word. Not really. But the man's fingers had cradled Cahey's skull in a tender curve, a touch that was as affectionate as it was uncomfortable. And so very wrong, for a business translation.