Elizabeth Bear Quotes

#1. As any parent can tell you, it's better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open when you go looking for kids who are being unreasonably quiet. They're probably doing something they don't want you to see, and if they hear you coming, they'll hide the evidence. I

Elizabeth Bear

#2. - I'm sorry, but I don't know any stories.

Elizabeth Bear

#3. There were none so scornful as those who had had to learn the hard way.

Elizabeth Bear

#4. The U.S.A. was outraged, and loudly said so to everyone, whether they would listen or not. But there wasn't much America could do about it, having sacrificed our space program on the altars of economic necessity and eternal war.

Elizabeth Bear

#5. BLINDSIGHT is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride.

Elizabeth Bear

#6. Marshal Reeves, watching me, snorted. "Live and learn, child," he said. "Everybody's worthy of respect.

Elizabeth Bear

#7. The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.

Elizabeth Bear

#8. But Doc knew that was the key to successful lying. People judged what other people would do by what they themselves would do. You could tell a hell of a lot about a man by what he assumed others got up to. If you're looking for a thief, bet on the man who's always accusing his neighbors.

Elizabeth Bear

#9. Glanced ostentatiously at my bangle. Blood alcohol content .01%, heart rate leveling off at 72 beats per minute, time 11:42 p.m.

Elizabeth Bear

#10. Bill blinked tears from his eyes, then fastened his gaze on me. "Bitch," he snarled - why they never think of anything cleverer I'll never know.

Elizabeth Bear

#11. I don't believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?

Elizabeth Bear

#12. For a brazen Libertine, an adulterer, a sodomite, an atheist, a fornicator, rakehell, heretic, godless playmaker and debaucher of innocents, you're a sorry state of affairs.

Elizabeth Bear

#13. The older he got, the simpler the world was revealed to be.

Elizabeth Bear

#14. Djinn," she said. "We go to review the troops. Clothe me as befits a queen."
"Silks and satins?" he asked, eyes sparkling like sapphires. "White brocade?"
"Armor," she said. "And flame.

Elizabeth Bear

#15. I don't know if it was the excitement that did it, but by the time we started our tiptoe across the icy, rutted skid yard to that shed Priya had quit shivering, but I was trembling like a marriage license in a young man's hand.

Elizabeth Bear

#16. A barn owl was perched atop the refrigerator.

Elizabeth Bear

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

Elizabeth Bear

#18. It's comforting when God lets you get away with something once in a while.

And a little unnerving. You start to wonder what he's got set up for you next and why he's softening you up, like.

Elizabeth Bear

#19. If you have to die [ ... ] better to go down fighting. Better to die in company. Better not be the last, and alone, weighed down with all that knowing.

Elizabeth Bear

#20. The words were low, more shape than breath.

Elizabeth Bear

#21. Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.

Elizabeth Bear

#22. Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.

Elizabeth Bear

#23. Once you absorb the maths, it's all perfectly clear.

Elizabeth Bear

#24. A woman in the West? You show me one who doesn't drink, and I'll show you one that wants to.

Elizabeth Bear

#25. If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?

Elizabeth Bear

#26. One must come to the understanding in the end that one was always insufficiently practiced, and yet one must sometimes act anyway. Practice itself was an act.

Elizabeth Bear

#27. The harpy smiles. A harpy's smile is an ugly thing, even seen edge-on. The harpy says, You do not have the power to make me not alone, Desiree.

Elizabeth Bear

#28. May I know your name, sir?"
The smile rearranged his face under the terrible scars. "Nezahualcoyotl. Michel Nezahualcoyotl. Charmed.

Elizabeth Bear

#29. The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say "please" and "thank you" same as any mother's son.

Elizabeth Bear

#30. Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.

Elizabeth Bear

#31. Opinions are like kittens," he commented. "People are always giving them away.

Elizabeth Bear

#32. She was alive. She was alive, and she had found her power - or it had found her.
Tomorrow's problems she'd take care of tomorrow.

Elizabeth Bear

#33. And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.

Elizabeth Bear

#34. The secret to getting away with lying, is believing with all your heart. That goes for lying to yourself even more so than lying to another

Elizabeth Bear

#35. Most of the people who fail in what they want to accomplish do so because they underestimate who they are. When they don't believe they can succeed at something, they have little chance.

Elizabeth Bear

#36. I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional computational linguist.

Elizabeth Bear

#37. Sanchez has always heard he's a good cop, maybe even a decent man. The latter's more common than the former; power breeds abuse.

Elizabeth Bear

#38. The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.

Elizabeth Bear

#39. Peter handed me a glass of wine - my own Neon White Red,

Elizabeth Bear

#40. She said, "You're a warrior. So how do you kill without rage?"
"In compassion. Because of necessity." Hrahima set the empty water bowl back in Samarkar's hands. "The same way you carry water.

Elizabeth Bear

#41. I am the Sovereign of Iss!" the girl declared. "And you are the daughter of Ciwril Xidyla! They had better listen to us.

Elizabeth Bear

#42. I liked her scowl and I liked her freedom to wear it.

Elizabeth Bear

#43. Women have more of that patience, as a class. That ain't because we're born with it, though. It's because we're schooled to it and taught early that if we don't have it we won't never win.

Elizabeth Bear

#44. Some things are just universal.
Like the known scientific fact that the colder and wetter you are, the better bacon smells frying.

Elizabeth Bear

#45. Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn't make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.

Elizabeth Bear

#46. The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point. There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren't paying attention.

Elizabeth Bear

#47. You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.

Elizabeth Bear

#48. No one is making me say this. No one is making me tell this story. Nobody's ever been much good at making me say anything I hadn't already made up my mind to say.

Elizabeth Bear

#49. But wasn't that part of a whore's job? Being the sort of ear that lonely men could turn to?

I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.

Elizabeth Bear

#50. Eavesdropping's a sin, but ignorance is fatal. Take your pick.

Elizabeth Bear

#51. The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace

Elizabeth Bear

#52. He made a noise she recognized, one that meant he was organizing whatever multidimensional information lattices inhabited his mental space into linear strings amenable to transmission through that inadequate medium, language.

Elizabeth Bear

#53. Though I am otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me.

Elizabeth Bear

#54. Angelo, he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia - the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain - and waking.

Elizabeth Bear

#55. My love is not water in a bucket, you know. It's not as if someone else can drink it all up and leave none left for you.

Elizabeth Bear

#56. You know," he said, "every time a vampire says he doesn't believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames.

Elizabeth Bear

#57. Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge the existence of abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can - social, biological, what have you.

Elizabeth Bear

#58. So why a woman did the same should be judged different ... well, women always is. Judged different, I mean.

Elizabeth Bear

#59. Some would say a whore don't have no expectation of Heaven. I'd say, if she gives value for cash, she's got a better shot at God's blessing than your average banker. Jesus loved Mary Magdalene. He kicked over tables when He met a moneylender.

Elizabeth Bear

#60. What was a book? Not just ink and fiber and stitchery: a series of processes. To a wizard, it was not a static object
but a human thought caught and bound, made concrete through sacred technology. Magic, then, and a deep form of it.

Elizabeth Bear

#61. All iron comes from stars," Seeker replied, her hand still not quite brushing the hilt of the blade. "It's the last element they can burn before they go nova. Iron's the skeletons of stars, and it's what makes our blood red. I

Elizabeth Bear