Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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Eavesdropping's a sin, but ignorance is fatal. Take your pick.
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Impatience and cutting corners: it’s the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.
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While humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.
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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.
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Pride’s worth a lot, it’s the only thing that can keep you walking when it feels like your feet’s worn down to the nubs. But as my ma would have said, you got to remember pride is a tool. You use it; you don’t let it use you. And you don’t sell your happiness ‘cause your spine’s too stiff to bend.
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And then I felt sick for believing in spite of myself. You get invested in things—love affairs, politics, con games—and you tie yourself in knots trying to make reality match up to what would make you happiest. The mad part is, what would make you happiest is to get your cope on for what is, rather than what you would rather have happen.
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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.
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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.
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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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The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Samarkar wondered at what point in a relationship it was appropriate to threaten to break a suitor’s kneecaps if he should prove insufficiently respectful of one’s friend.
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An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.
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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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That night, he kept activating the readout from his chip on the mobile’s login screen: Enfranchised.
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I heard that, too. Nope. I’m an animal behaviorist. Here to assess recent changes in communication patterns. You in whale processing?
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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.
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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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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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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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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.