Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

there were none so scornful as those who had had to learn the hard way.

Only more cat-shaped. (Jeoffry, a poet's cat, has ignored vast amounts of Milton over the years, but some of it has apparently stuck.)

Butter wouldn't have melted my smile, I swear.

Art isn't really about raw unmediated access to reality: that's reality. You get that at the bus stop. Art is about interpreting reality, pointing up certain aspects of it, focusing attention. Editing." Most

He understands, also, that this offer represents a fundamentally wrong order to the universe. You should bow down and worship Jeoffry! "Right," the devil says. "I thought as much.

we must create our children alive and fragile and pulsing with the hot blood that is so easy, so terribly easy to spill." It

Amazing what people can fail to see when it's a man doing it to a woman, even a respectable-looking woman.

She rolled her shoulders over a corset that gave her the general appearance of the prow of a battleship, and curled one loose strand around her finger in a gesture that would have been coquettish, were she young.

There are multiple claims to Mr. Smart.

Perceval could not be crying, because Perceval did not cry. But something shining froze on her face as she strode at the center of the group, her parasite wings flared about her like a nest of barbs. She looked severe and resolute-no one could look pale, standing next to Tristen-and Rien admired her desperately.

The collective resources of an authoress, a sorceress, and a wampyr and his valet are not to be underestimated.

You did not love an angel to be safe, or in the interests of survival, or even because you thought the angel might even love you back. You did not love an angel because you thought you could tame an angel, change it, make it safe. You loved an angel because to love an angel was to touch something larger than yourself, and because the process of that touch enlarged you as well.

I hadn't the wit left to divert Mme. Pontchartrain's determined questioning. Fortunately, I had the wit to realize it, so I pled a cognac headache and fled.

I can all but hear my Haudenoseunee grandfather's wry comments as he stopped to pick up litter on the roadside.

What an intoxicating idea: an alien-a real alien. A creature of mythic resonance.

If you're stupid enough to sleep with your superior, you'd best be smart enough to use whatever you have left.

No peacocks were harmed in the making of all this dinner. And how could I have misdirected our gallant maidens, when your agents guided them? Agents whose introduction to the game I protested?

There was, they conceded, no point in pretending to be other than they were, as it seemed their presence was not secret and never had been.

She laid a hand on his shoulder, a motherly gesture that made his skin crawl.

A dark-haired young woman in bright sunflower barrettes brushed by Matthew; undressing him with a look that he profoundly ignored, though he wouldn't have if he'd felt the fey iciness that a very particular, very exhausting sort of spell cloaked from both him and Kit.

My Prince, Gavin thought, I seriously question your judgment.

We went to our separate corners to muse, and mope, and stare thoughtfully out the viewports.

The salt and blood of him filled her mouth, and now her flaws were tingling, itching too. She leaned in, purring, and he backed up a step.

Another wave, and this one wet him to the knee, spray salting his cheek and lips. The flavor was as musky as the lamia's scent, salt and depth and thousands of deaths, over thousands of years, all washed down into the endless, consuming sea.