Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

The scent is hot wine, acidic and intense. Spicy, irresistible.

Kit reached up and over, felt down the spring plane of his shoulder blade. His left arm with its old injury wouldn't flex so far; he reached with the right. Blood-gorged flesh heated his fingertips. He could feel, almost, the outline of each tooth, the roughness of a seeking tongue. Right where someone might bite a lover take from behind- Right where a wing would take root, if he had wings.

Some things you want to make sure your teammates have access to if anything bad should happen to you.

Great passion led so easily to great tragedy.

The carved wood wore into his shoulder, a reassuring discomfort. He pressed himself against it, parting the bed curtains, and with his right eye saw the light of strength dimming from a man he used to fancy was his lover.

We're fucked," Seeker confirmed. "Welcome to fairytales. Have a nice day. Canapé?

A wild, sleepless sorrow hovered inside my chest.

Thou wert always the teacher, wert thou not? The seducer with truths, the bestower of knowledge and power.

He didn't think it at me, I could feel his irritation, and also his recognition of the fact that meatforms did a lot of stupid thing because of our meat, and the senseless chitter of our drunkard's walk evolutionary development didn't help.

The cold wind tugged Kit's hair, a sensation like the caress of Lucifer's feathers.

Seeker thought if she laid a hand on the other's cheek, she could cut her palm to the bone.

The quarry lies ahead, the pack lies behind; the grass and gravel and tramped earth lie steady beneath his feet.

You get so used to hurting that when it goes away not being in pain doesn't even feel normal, exactly.

I don't go for the sexy bad girl thing anymore, but…damn.

He follows that scent-that hated, enticing, bittersweet scent-to its inevitable conclusion. A man, a man who does not serve. A man who threatens something the hound holds dear. A man who will not be permitted to continue.

Lucifer's halo filled the grim little room with light, and he seemed suddenly more beautiful than ever. Something fragile and almost mortal, unreal, outlined against the sweating stone.

The Republican pirate was charismatic in a way that reached right past all the rightminding safe-guards on my emotions and hormones and made me want to know her better and bond and be best friends with her forever.

You're going to get fired by the Synarche before they even really hire you, if you keep up this line of thinking." He laughed his light machine laugh. "This line of thinking is why they want me, Haimey.

The tilt of the Technomancer's head was an old woman's mockery of a young woman's simpering. It charmed him.

Humans have their hearts. Humans have their souls. And look at the abominations they achieve.

It's not a scent, precisely, more a contagion, a trace of the passage of the one they hunt.

Kit caught Will's eye, and the smile he sent down might have melted Will like a candle end. Lovesick fool, Will thought, and looked down before someone could notice his silly grin and draw an entirely correct conclusion.

I was losing this round, and I neded to disengage without seming like I was running away.

Or perhaps all that white served to mark him as a virgin sacrifice, which was a thought worth a slightly hysterical giggle.