Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

Kadiska wore red pantaloons slung low across her belly, showing her navel and the beaded lines of scars. Gold cloth wound her breasts, golden sandals wound her ankles, and a shawl of cloudlike like woal wrapped her shoulders and muffled her arms. Except when she reached out, as she did now, and ran her fingers through Seeker's hair, tricking the dark strands behind an ear in which an emerald still glittered.

The dying had the gift of ruthlessness. He knew that by hard experience. And there was something in her expression as she looked up at him that stopped his voice completely.

Oxford was always one to speak in riddles, enjoying teasing others with what he knew and what they didn't, and Kit had no stomach for it now.

They play politics layered on politics, and their goals are opaque to me." "Their goals are very simple," Murchaud replied, turning as if startled. "Power, earthly and divine. Revolution, and the overthrow of the old ways.

Pray let us greet our host and the guest of honor, that I may receive my measure of scorn from each and we may be away.

Petty vengeance had been well within his father's capabilities, and using children to control their parents was an established family technique.

Golden wings, golden eyes, a dream of memory and warmth as Kit dropped to his knees, body clenched around a scream he was still too proud to give voice.

By the elements, by the ten directions. I have not forgotten. My name is Jacob Dust, and I have not forgotten.

Really, he mused, chasing green peas up the back slope of his fork with the edge of the butter knife, all a smirk was, was what a smile turned into when you fought with it.

It sounded religious to her. We come from dust. We are stardust. We are dust on the wind.

Dust was an Angel. He was by nature a servant, even if his service often meant something more like mastery.

I look out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.

It's kind of horrifying to think of an era when people were so constrained to and by gender, in which the externals you were born with were something you would be stuck with your whole life, could never alter, and it would determine your entire social role and your potential for emotional fulfilment and intellectual achievement.

Comest thou to a snake for sympathy, Sir Poet?" "I come to a snake for information. What may be equally foolish.

There was, as far as Garrett understood, no actual reason why incantations were in Latin or Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew, other than tradition and mystique. But she found the discipline useful.

It was no other than he had expected, but he could play out the game.

Sure. A girl can walk away from her dreams of vengeance. I still want to see Valens court-martialed for what he did to me almost thirty years back. On the other hand, he's saved my life twice now. Sometimes things get a little hard to reconcile.

You are a Conn, through and through, Ariane, and rotten with it. But it's also possible that you are our only hope for survival.

It must be awkward wearing one's whole interior life on display, for anyone to read.

She used to be all sorts of things.

Reality is seldom as melodramatic as entertainment. On the other hand, reality is more random, arbitrary, and dangerous than fiction, and it's my job to understand that to exact tolerances.

We can endure this. We endure. We live. We cooperate if we must. And then we find our vengeance.

Will. A name that still had the power to stop his breath. Aye, and i'd traffic with Hell for thee all over again, for a moment such as this.

Your brain is optimized for pattern-sensing," Gavin commented. "And chatter.