Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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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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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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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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A good thing they didn’t know I was traveling with a trio of warrior women. I wouldn’t have stood a chance alone.
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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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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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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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Spurred on by both the science and science fiction of our time, my generation of researchers and engineers grew up to ask what if? and what’s next? We went on to pursue new disciplines like computer vision, artificial intelligence, real-time speech translation, machine learning, and quantum computing.
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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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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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That night, he kept activating the readout from his chip on the mobile’s login screen: Enfranchised.
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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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Few are the memories which are more than a handful of dust, to be let run through the fingers.
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Rudeness is a weak person's imitation of strength.
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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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The world stood pinned on two thorns. One was ugliness. One was beauty. The truth did not lie in the middle or at either extreme. The truth encompassed both.
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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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Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.
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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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You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
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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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Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable.
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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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What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?