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...there were none so scornful as those who had had to learn the hard way.
Elizabeth Bear -
Opinions are like kittens. People are always giving them away.
Elizabeth Bear
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Maybe all obligate carnivores are essentially the same. Can I eat that? Is it going to eat me? Is it a toy?
Elizabeth Bear -
We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.
Elizabeth Bear -
Anyway, one of the first things you learn in space is not to thrash. If you have nothing constructive to do, the most constructive thing you can do is often nothing at all. In a mindful sense, I mean. Thrashing is the thing that gets people killed. Not sitting still.
Elizabeth Bear -
What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?
Elizabeth Bear -
The way I saw it, nobody thought the worse of a man who followed his pecker anywhere it sniffed, like a droopy-faced hound dog led on by his nose. So why a woman did the same should be judged different… well, women always is.
Elizabeth Bear -
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
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Girls in my profession know a little too much about men. The ones who want to know a woman as a person are fewer than you’d hope, and most of those don’t even realize it about themselves. They don’t care who a woman is, or what she’s scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear.
Elizabeth Bear -
Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.
Elizabeth Bear -
The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say "please" and "thank you" same as any mother's son.
Elizabeth Bear -
Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when they speak the truth they are not believed.
Elizabeth Bear -
Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.
Elizabeth Bear -
You ever hear somebody blithely say something so amazingly plastered over with bullshit it just makes your eyes bug?
Elizabeth Bear
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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 -
Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.
Elizabeth Bear -
It’s funny, ain’t it, that nobody holds giving men the illusion they want about themselves against wives, though they hold it against the sisters. And nobody holds it against the illusionists, though they do against spiritualists. I’m not quite sure how to explain what I’m driving at, except it seems to me that these things is all linked.
Elizabeth Bear -
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 -
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 -
The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.
Elizabeth Bear
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The tactic seemed to work, so he stuck to the same theme for the next few days, but there was only so much cryptography he could teach before it started squeezing out everything else.
Elizabeth Bear -
A good thing they didn’t know I was traveling with a trio of warrior women. I wouldn’t have stood a chance alone.
Elizabeth Bear -
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 -
When you are a certain age or when you have lost certain things and people, Aimee’s crippling grief will make a terrible poisoned dark sense.
Elizabeth Bear