Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

We need each other, and we need literature, and we need knowledge-and we need very much, to try to be accountable for our own feelings and live up to our best selves. That reality might seem subjective and foolish to Farweather, but it seems objective and rational to me.

My taste was terrible, but it was not that bad.

His pilots. And no, frankly, just his pathway to other worlds, but personal friends, all three of them.

She looked like a planetary: not tall, but her body bulky with high grav muscles, shoulders wide and sleeves of her coverall rolled up to show off sculpted forearms. She had a broad face with high, slanted cheekbones; coffee-dark eyes with a moderate fold, straight black hair chopped at the ear except for some longer locks, those dyed in fluttering streaks of red and gold.

Sebastien said nothing, but his lips burned with Jack's warmth as he shut the door behind himself and turned to face the stair.

God protect the halt and the lame," he muttered. "Also the purblind fools. And one Kit Marlowe, wherever he may be.

There were other, messier details in the story, but we didn't need to go into those now, and here.

Trust an old wizard when she says you did well.

Lucifer was laughing, defending himself delightedly from the slender light wrapped figure who pressed him only tentatively.

She was old, and too worn thin to wonder. But oh, what a beautiful boy he was then.

She chuckled and rattled her chain.

Be cautious, please. I should hate to lose the pleasure of your conversation.

The full story was not for strangers in bars.

The girl-no older than Rien, though far more imposing-was Family.

Her light gold complexion was dusted in cobwebs of silver.

Sometimes, laziness was the next best thing to genius.

Abby Irene smiled. And she did, Sebastien loved her, the brittle mortality and all its mad, fragile bravery.

Something within Kit's breast stirred with a pain like trapped and beating wings.

The woman looking back at me is a stranger indeed. Her hair has grown out into a sort of boyish bob, steel black, silvering bangs falling across her forehead. They mostly hide the places where smooth, paler skin blends into her tanned medium-brown hide. The skin on the left side of her face, near the hairline, is oddly mottled, like a frog.

If it's your fault, you weren't just a helpless dupe, right? But if somebody else tells you that you weren't a helpless dupe, you get angry.

One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be more ethical.

Shall I compare thee to a docking ring? Thou are more beautiful and more temperate, though that's not really hard when you're talking about an airlock whose external temperature is measured on the low end of kelvins. On the other hand, I'm not sure I could have been happier with anything or felt more raw, unfettered love than I did for that docking ring, right there. Free and my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and I sighed.

He might be a dead man. He might sometimes find himself grown very tired. But he could not find it in himself to regret the circumstances of his death, no matter how unusual.

A weapon is only a weapon with a will behind it, and a chain is only a chain when someone holds the key.