Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Behind him, a woman's voice rises, fluid and mellifluous on words he does not understand, until Will pushed himself upright with both hands flat on the dew and got his feet under him in a crouch.

My sin is love in that I love my sin too well to wish to repent of it.

The chained girl's eyes swept the room like searchlights. Rien lowered her gaze when the stare seared over her.

The quaver in his voice was less showmanship than he would have wanted it to be.

Hey, I'd found an option that was even less appealing that starving to death. Let's hear it for human ingenuity!

If she'd had a head, she'd be shaking it.

The builders must never have imagined that the world might find itself not only fragmented, but wishing to lie between modules.

They were cordial enough in that way that people can be who have nothing in common and little to talk about. Muire was satisfied with the lack of depth in that relationship, even as Thorvaldsdottir's political activism lead her to celebrity and a series of public confronations and condemnations over the Eiledian Thing's handling of the current crisis.

I couldn't tell if the vertigo was fear, or some strange side effect of glitterweb crawling up my arm.

The expectation of an injury can hurt as much as the injury itself.

She let her hand slide across the tailored dark fabric of his trousers before leaning back, curling against the arm of the loveseat in a manner that would have horrified her tutors.

I tried not to feel self-conscious about the sparkles floating under my skin.

What settled over him felt like the brush of a silk sheet down his skin. What followed that touch was blackness, utter and complete.

Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones, Liar, was going to have to tell someone the truth.

Peace, pussycat." There was-Christ-pride in Baines' voice; the tone was enough to make Kit wish he had something in his gut to vomit. "I'd rather burn a cathedral than see thee come to any lasting harm. What a waste of eighteen years' work that would be.

It's hard to punch a free-floating shipvoice, though, and whaling a bulkhead would look silly, send me spinning across the cabin, and hurt me more than it hurt Singer.

any tool can also be a weapon of oppression as easily as it can be an implement of construction.

Somehow his memory for things concerning the Wolf-and Muire, for that matter-seemed very crisp. Vivid, as if only they they were real and the rest of his life had been a dream.

The stone hushed my footsteps instead of ringing with them, and yet the sun shone from without them, golden as the walls.

Somewhere, he found a smile that was positively sunny, and gave it to her.

She wanted to save Rien from any hurt, but there were some hurts you could rescue no one from.

He couldn't quite manage the defiant glance over his shoulder and the lift of his chin he would have liked, but his voice stayed steady and that was a victory in itself.

Art keeping me among the living, angel?

There was a girl. There's always a girl, they say, and in this case it was true.