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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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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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 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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Opinions are like kittens. People are always giving them away.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Sometimes the truth, told right, was the best lie.
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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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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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Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.
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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.
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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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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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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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Amazing what people can fail to see when it’s a man doing it to a woman, even a respectable-looking woman.
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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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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.