Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.
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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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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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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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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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Sometimes the truth, told right, was the best lie.
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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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Butter wouldn't have melted my smile, I swear.
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Opinions are like kittens. People are always giving them away.
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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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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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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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Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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A good thing they didn’t know I was traveling with a trio of warrior women. I wouldn’t have stood a chance alone.