Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

There's always somebody who feels like they have a right to judge.

I blinked but managed not to glance at her, surprised as always to be reminded she was human.

She blinked, and considered and slicked her whiskers against her face in contemplation.

Like queen bees awakened in the hive, one of them would consume the rest. It all came down to who was going to be the last demiurge standing.

He'll come back to you," David said. "Haven't you noticed we all do?

Of the things that bind the universe together, gravity is not particularly strong a force, as it happens. It just…never stops reaching. That always sort of made me feel good about gravity. It's always looking for the next rock, always something down a breaker in space-time, whipping something in a long, arcing curve around something else. Gravity doesn't give up. It keeps on trucking.

She was Alasdair Conn's oldest daughter, the Princess of the Jacob's Ladder. She was both fierce and beautiful, and why she'd chosen him, he'd never know.

It's so easy to be catastrophically wrong. And so difficult to admit it to yourself, internalize it, and act upon the knowledge.

Politeness counts the effort, or so one of my clademothers used to say.

He ducked his head and kissed the tattoo of a sorcerer, nestled just between her breasts.

It's an obscenity, the final degradation, that you have been infested by the spoor of such fragile parasites.

Thy King needs thee to shape what will follow, Will. There's nothing thou canst do to help Marlowe now. They will have already begun.

She laughed, a cat's soundless amusement, and nodded thanks.

What cannot be cured must be endured, and Tristen excelled at enduring.

Just the sort of stuff that doesn't seem important to deal with right now when you're busy, until you can't get to your skin because you're seal inside an isolation film and it's the only thing you can think about.

Danilaw's underlying genetic users meant his own emotional balance could stray from perfection and his inherited neurochemistry meant that his rightminding fell in need of more frequent-than-usual maintenance. Not enough to cause a social disadvantage, or free him from Obligations-but enough to make him wish sometimes it might.

With my eyes blank, with my body numb and distant, with a mind full of the cold spinning depths of space, I focus all my attention, reach out an aim that's no more than a vision, and point.

The Merlin's sense of humor would be the death of me yet.

Perceval smiled inside, but she would not let her lips curve. No one must see her mirth at an execution-no one except the executed, who would know it without being shown.

Good thing for me you're not a murderer." I smiled. "I could learn.

Yes, surely that was a disruption. But it was not even remotely the whole story.

You generally need at least a modicrum of stability for people to have the time and resources to innovate and the will to make risky choices.

The city, a beast all its own: a beast of stone with iron teeth and a heart of hot meat, pulsing living blood through its arteries and avenues.

Tristen had been only half kidding. Samael's expression hinted that the angel had the other half. Tristen guessed that added up to one complete sense of humour between them.