Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

I loved him. I love you. After a fashion.

I have to get out of here. The bastards have Will.

Oh, that was fang indeed, and the flicker of a long forked tongue in silent laughter.

He's a fragile, girlish sort of a boy with eyes like watchful black jewels.

I clamped and stitched and cauterized, somehow finding myself in a zone of total focus where the noises of half a hundred different species trying to make themselves urgently understood seemed distant, unreal.

Thinking about the future was really doing a number on me.

Coincidence was possible. But what was much more likely was enemy action.

Once again, you rule our destiny.

Was that what it sounded like when a Rashaquin guffawed? It reminded me of a whole orchestra's string section tuning.

In the souls of the craftsmen who carved this mine, utility was no excuse for a thing to be anything but beautiful.

We've walked into a lover's quarrel, gentlemen.

Conflict is the essence of drama.

Preconceptions influence the outcomes.

Consciences are the sort of thing that don't seem really desirable to have, unless you're currently using yours.

His hair shone blue-black in ringlets and a ruddy light gleamed behind the windows of his eyes, as clear as water running over stones.

She wondered when she had moved from mere conspiracy to treason.

Poetry, he realized, in watching Will's face. A furious brightness sparked in Kit's breast, equal parts pride and fury. Even now, he comes back with poetry.

He wondered if a werewolf's bloodlust, its passion, its compulsion, could possibly be more unendurable than his thirst.

My love is not water in a bucket, you know. It's not as if someone else can drink it all up and leave none for you.

He sipped his wine and swirled it in the goblet, wishing bitterly that he could close the distance to the little cover by the fire and be one of them again. Wishing he could remember the touch of Will's hand, the press of Tom's mouth, without tasting the enormous soft emptiness that threatened to open like black wings and enfold him.

I did not want to keep talking to her. But I didn't want to be totally alone with only the sound of my own voice in my head to argue with, either.

I liked who I was now. It wasn't entirely comfortable-I knew there were places wher I chafed and rubbed and prickled, against my shipmates and against myself-but overall, I liked who I'd been with Singer and Connla.

Her long green-and-silver body lay like a jeweled ribbon dropped on the dust-colored winter grass near that strange white tree, her woman's torso rose among the ice-covered branches, her hands upraised like a supplicating sinner.

She was what she was. She did what she did. I didn't think she worried about the whys and wherefores too much, come to think of it.