Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Shall I compare thee to a docking ring? Thou art 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 then. Free and with my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and sighed

You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it's gone. Like it never was. Like you can't even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to. I've seen some shit, let me tell you.

But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I'd been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity.

Sanchez has always heard he's a good cop, maybe even a decent man. The latter's more common than the former; power breeds abuse.

I don't believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?

I wound up playing secret agent/detective/tour guide to a sexy robot. If that sounds like the sort of punishment that would be handed out in a particularly surrealist purgatory, congratulations. You're not wrong.

Once you absorb the maths, it's all perfectly clear.

I am the Sovereign of Iss!" the girl declared. "And you are the daughter of Ciwril Xidyla! They had better listen to us.

Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran.

I heard that, too. Nope. I'm an animal behaviorist. Here to assess recent changes in communication patterns. You in whale processing?

Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles.

When the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there's time to bake.

Was this what having an identity felt like? Was this being someone? Feeling like there was a core of who you were beyond which you could not be altered? Feeling . . . continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma.

The U.S.A. was outraged, and loudly said so to everyone, whether they would listen or not. But there wasn't much America could do about it, having sacrificed our space program on the altars of economic necessity and eternal war.

The era of Terra's history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the generation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival.

We eat our mates if we can catch them. Everybody's got some evolutionary baggage that winds up maladaptive in a sophont setting.- "Valuable protein resource." I shrugged. "And it's not as if your species is designed for coparenting.

Some would say a whore don't have no expectation of Heaven. I'd say, if she gives value for cash, she's got a better shot at God's blessing than your average banker. Jesus loved Mary Magdalene. He kicked over tables when He met a moneylender.

I should of been chewing on my words some, so everybody else would have had a better chance of swallowing them.

You burned her because your gifts come wreathed in flames, and your heart is an ember, and your breath is a star, and because you loved her and you wanted to give her everything you are

Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone. They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.

Peter handed me a glass of wine—my own Neon White Red,

Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They'll figure out a pattern even if all you've got are random data points that don't actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians. And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.

What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?

The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace