Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

I am a sorcerer, lad, not a cannibal.

He did not think he'd ever seen her lie down to rest, or even claim a need for it.

Muire's cheeks stung. She didn't want to think of them, or Mingan's obscene pleasure in finally having Strijbjorn under orders and biddable. Nor did she wish to think that the Grey Wolf had gone from hanging his deadly embrace over her, to having his way with this candle-flicker.

I have the feeling," she said when the other two turned, "that this is supposed to be a historic meeting. Fraught with significance. The sort of things bards might sing of, if there were bard anymore." "And it feels a little anticlimatic?" "Yes.

Zanya was washing her hair. And I was watching the networking of tiny glistening particles swirl across her skin as she knelt over the basin of water I'd brought her.

The girl was tall, almost sexless in her slenderness and anything but sensual, though she was naked except for streaks of indigo blood, dirt, and manacles.

I have terrible taste in women. And Zanya, being an awful human being, was exactly the kind of terrible that was just to my taste.

Whatever moved in Kit was vast and slow, a symphony of emotion that swelled from discord into something complex and bittersweet and whole.

Be careful what you name a thing.

He turned his head to press his face to the cold glass of the portal, a gesture Richard saw a lot among his pilots. His pilots. With their hair-trigger reflexes and enhanced senses that made the simplest navigation through daily life an act of courage and endurance. His pilots. Richard's pilots. Richard's ticket to the stars.

Seeker could have peered inside Morgan's cottage, but some perversity moved her to play fair.

I shrugged, and wondered if Pearl could see in that simple gesture the pain of losing an enforced religion because somebody gave you the switch and you were curious enough to turn it off.

You can turn off sex, and you can turn off romantic love-but it's really hard to turn off all the human emotional responses to a powerful individual without also turning off your humanity.

At Abernathy's arched eyebrow, he felt the need to reassure. Sebastien did, after all, find him quite attractive. In both guises.

Moral compromises don't stop happening even when everyone involved is trying to do the right thing.

The dead cast no shadows; nor did they reflect.

I…discovered I liked my own dance. So I stayed away and they requested another retreat on, which they were legally obligated to give me. And that I decided I wasn't going back at all.

Much as she despised the man, she had to admit to a certain agreeable shiver when his lips brushed her glove.

It was a beginning. He was a seed. He could grow.

The valraven, for all his size and weight, cupped air and settled behind Cristokos silently, except for the hiss of steam and the creak and tick of metal.

She shrugged. More muscles, more rippling. More sparkles, like glitter flowing in water under moving lights.

I've come back to you for a reason, Mother of Dragons-mistress of worms and serpents, from the smallest crawlers that renew the loam to the world-girding monster devouring his own tail.

There's something about Richard that's hard to get used to, when you've been dealing with the likes of Valens, and I don't know how to describe it. They both delight in tricking people, in holding all the cards.

The Devil might claim he could not see in human hearts. But Lucifer was, after all, the Prince of Lies. And when those lies went clothed in truth, so much the better.