Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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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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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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Sometimes the truth, told right, was the best lie.
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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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Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.
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Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.
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Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.
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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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Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable.
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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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The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.
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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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Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.
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Nobody called her Moggy except for Mother, either. Nobody ever called me Kittycat except my family, and people who were looking for a fight.
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The words were low, more shape than breath.
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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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There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake.
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You ever hear somebody blithely say something so amazingly plastered over with bullshit it just makes your eyes bug?
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So why a woman did the same should be judged different … well, women always is. Judged different, I mean.
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Most of the people who fail in what they want to accomplish do so because they underestimate who they are. When they don’t believe they can succeed at something, they have little chance.
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You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
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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.
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Rudeness is a weak person's imitation of strength.
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I’m sorry, but I don’t know any stories.