Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Few are the memories which are more than a handful of dust, to be let run through the fingers.
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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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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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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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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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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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You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
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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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Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable.
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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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Rudeness is a weak person's imitation of strength.
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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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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.