Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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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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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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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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Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable.
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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 could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?
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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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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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Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.
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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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Though I am otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me.
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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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You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
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Butter wouldn't have melted my smile, I swear.
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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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You ever hear somebody blithely say something so amazingly plastered over with bullshit it just makes your eyes bug?
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If there was one vice his old masters could smell out from a thousand li away, it was thinking too well of yourself. Or the other form of vanity that was thinking too little.
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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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I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional computational linguist.
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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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The tactic seemed to work, so he stuck to the same theme for the next few days, but there was only so much cryptography he could teach before it started squeezing out everything else.
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Rudeness is a weak person's imitation of strength.