Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

She catches my gaze when I would have turned away.

The Goodlaw gave one of its enormous highly oxygenated sighs.

The news of Will's escape was enough to grant Kit new strength of intent. He'll come for me. He won't leave me here. He knew it, with the same calm certainty with which he'd known that he could not leave Will to take his own place in Hell.

The shadow towered, from the snake to a shape with tufted ears laid flat, a lynx.

It was Robert Poley who unhooded Will, much later in a candlelit room with an arrow slit that show only blackness but admitted the stink of the Thames.

I kept waiting for her to reach out, to ask, to flirt. To get back to her gaslighting games, to get whatever she wanted from me.

It had been a summery morning near the spring solstice, two hundred and seven years previous to meeting the Grey Wolf in a dark alley under the curve of the Tower.

Tristen could imagine enjoying himself in a role as figurehead, surrounded by eager and talented young persons who did all the hard work while he basked in reflected-and retrospective glory.

The moment is stillness, utter and heartless, and that stillness continus when I step into the water again and wade back to shore, sodden trouser cuffs, clinging to my ankles.

For nothing on the waters and the wide wide world is fiercer than a mother.

You will be quite safe, Master Shakespeare. My lord Salisbury would never permit you to come to harm; you are one of England's treasures in your very own person. But simply too much trouble to be left lying until things are more certain.

David had been angry with the Church, the King, himself, the tissues of lies that he'd been raised on. But not with Sebastien, not except briefly and at first, when Sebastien had taught him that the desires David had been raised to consider anathema were not merely a matter of unconfessable groping in filthy alleys, of lewdness and whoring.

It was in me, this terrible history. It was part of me, and I could not get it out.

Poley rested his knuckles on his lips, the image of a fighting cock.

The little cultural differences could seem absolutely homey, compared to the big ones.

I am many things: not a single one of them makes me qualified to troubleshoot or debug or antivirus an AI.

Hush, puss," Baines said in a low tone that nevertheless carried. "Or I'll yet see thee in that bride thou dost hate.

She smiled, showing flesh-tearing teeth, and undressed him quite meticulously with her eyes.

If they couldn't be together, and content; if they couldn't avoid being unhappy, even for a little while; if they were expected to take individual responsibility for their collective decision and suffer consequences for it…they did not wish to.

His bones ached of a morning, winter and summer, these days; it was only a matter of degree.

The best she could do: waelcyrge did not die unless until they grew tarnished.

An interrogation was a relationship, and relationships were based on developing trust.

Pinion folded around her, cushioned her fall, so the impacts of shattering branches that would have also shattered her bones only knocked the wind out of her.

It's peace we offer the world: an end to the black sorceries that foul men's minds, an end to the power of Faeries who steal babies from cradles and poets from graves. A Senate like Rome, perhaps, or a democracy like Athens. Peace. An end to tyranny.