Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Something filled the Earl's eyes-not fury, precisely, or desperation, but whatever it was the player's part of Will's mind saw it and recognized it as motivation. And saw in that silence the thing Salisbury wouldn't say. James is a terrible king.

How did he know of this place? What is it, a shadow world, world of the half-told stories?

I had a giant bug to help me. (In all honesty I was probably the sidekick in this equation. But it makes me feel better to pretend otherwise.)

She said she could do it. Either she can, or she can't, and riding her about it just wastes everyone's time.

I don't know, even now, if that was honesty or a guilt trip. Or maybe sometimes a thing can be both.

I must discern how I may invade the Tower of London, from which I have myself only recently escaped.

The voice in my head was sounding more and more like Singer with every passing day.

My braid was silver-black where his is like winter butter, but his eyes are gray as mine and as full of starlight.

The cast had to come off before she could attempt a sculpture of her prey.

Farweather was the one who made an extreme sport of plunging through space under her own impulse, sliding about shipless in the void-and practice counts. I wished I believed in the convenient entertainment myth that just really wanting it more than the other guy was enough to insure success.

Sebastien lay with closed eyes and listened to the silent, cool pressure of the couch, more an absence than a presence. It was as if a ghost lay down beside him. He knew without looking that David would be leaned on one elbow, studying Sebastien over the narrow bridge of his nose.

Oliver Cromwell came floating back to me. "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

He eats souls, Cathoair. It's where he gets his food.

There is a thoughtfulness in her small nose and pointed chin that I am unused to seeing in the children of the Light.

I hope nothing killed it." Anything that could take on an Ativahika— well, Singer was an unarmed tug, and fuel-efficient, but not what you would call a fast or maneuverable flyer. He was good at going in straight lines really cheaply while hauling enormous masses at a safe but respectable clip, though—which was why his white coils were so much bigger than he was. None better, if that was what you needed, and usually in our case it was

How many can say they got to see the world end twice?

People are so complicated.

She was continuing to develop and evolve. All she had ever needed was the resources to enrich herself, and the space in which to grow. She was so brave and so slight-and, okay, so glittery-that my eyes stung a little from looking at her.

She understood that she was being tested, but she did not know the nature of the test.

The baby in her arms was silent: ensorceled, and there would be a simulacram left in the crib, a changeling. A fey mockery to die by sunrise, and leave the grieving family to wonder. Crib death. Elf-stroke. How little we remember.

It had been impressed on Rien all through her childhood how fragile the habitable sphere was, and how much functionality had been lost through accident, negligence, malice, and the simple gnawing of entropy.

We can bite down on a grudge and grin around it until the end of time.

He had never been able to name things himself-he was, after all, in chief a sort of archivist-but as with many archivists, a good irony and a pun delighted him.

Sooner or later, in Jack's experience, a wampyr found out everything.