Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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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.
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The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say "please" and "thank you" same as any mother's son.
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Went up to the dressing room and got kitted, all crinolines and kilted skirts and my tits about falling out the top of my daffodil taffeta dress whenever I grabbed a breath.
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I should of been chewing on my words some, so everybody else would have had a better chance of swallowing them.
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Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when they speak the truth they are not believed.
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One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes the truth, told right, was the best lie.
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You’d never break this one. You’d never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile.
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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.
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Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.
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Them as work hardest get no respect for it – women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics – and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day’s labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family’s bellies is all about.
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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.
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You know, every time a vampire says he doesn't believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames.
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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.
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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.
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Butter wouldn't have melted my smile, I swear.
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Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.
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Opinions are like kittens. People are always giving them away.
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The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.
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Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.
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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.