Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

I might have her body under control-but she, in her own way, had mine. I was going where she wanted to go, where her friends were waiting for us. And okay, it might be a little embarrassing for her to explain how she wound up handcuffed to a stanchion, but she could probably spin that as part of her master plan to subvert me.

If I could see her, she could probably see me. If she was looking, and maybe even if she wasn't. And I expected her to be looking.

By what right does your world cast mine in shadow? What gives you the right to plenty?

The Parisian attitude toward sorcery-that its public practice was little more interesting and certainly more gauche than sex in the doorways or pissing in the gutter-was refreshing.

He's so bad he can be sweet as ice cream every second and nobody forgets for any one of those seconds that he's the baddest man in the room. That's what I like. Men who could beat up my dad. They make me feel safe.

Muire closed her eyes and spoke around a heart's denial.

Let's stop adding v and just keep going, and try to think of a solution before we become an ironic footnote to salvage tug history, shall we?

My flight led me through twisting companion-ways and chambers vast and tiny and in between, whose purpose was indeterminate because I did not stop to investigate.

He did not mock her service, even by implication, even when he did not condone the means by which she served.

The sea broke over her bulk and foamed around his bare feet, drawing the sand from under his soles as if sucked by mouths.

Marlowe patted Matthew on the shoulder, and Matthew found himself grinning in naked relief; notorious rakehell, sodomite, and playboy he might be remembered as, but lately Christopher Marlowe was the only person who seemed willing to touch Matthew without some implication lying predatory behind it.

You're pretty bright when you allow yourself to be.

It's about your sister, Chief Engineer." "Of course it is," Caitlin said, rubbing her eyes until she felt the muscles stretch. "Which one, I'm terrified to ask?

Feeling like you're the protagonist of your own story doesn't guarantee you're going to make it to the final act of anybody else's.

There's nothing like being annoyed by different sentiences to make you really appreciate your own.

I didn't think too hard about anything, which, being me, was one of the most unnatural things I have ever done.

Even after the end of the world, there was weeding.

I couldn't have called after her. My throat was full of thorns and no words could have gotten past.

When all else failed, her grandmother Mary would have said, good manners never deserted one.

I'd believed. And now I couldn't believe anymore. And I missed that believing so much. This must be what losing your religion feels like.

Earth is an egg, Casey. Eventually, the hatchling either puts its beak through the shell, or it suffocates in its own waste.

Earth rained on the bushed-copper coffin like the heating of my heart in my ears.

Fear was not a familiar sensation, and this fear-stranger-fear of the unknown-even less so. Among the legacies of atavism corrected by rightminding was the overactive fear response of the human amygdala to anything foreign or strange.

Absently her hand came up to press the place between her breasts where a sigil tattooed in crimson marked her training. She felt as if his gaze burrowed through cloth to notice it.