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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.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear
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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.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear -
Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn't make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.
Elizabeth Bear -
Butter wouldn't have melted my smile, I swear.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear
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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.
Elizabeth Bear -
Nobody called her Moggy except for Mother, either. Nobody ever called me Kittycat except my family, and people who were looking for a fight.
Elizabeth Bear -
I’m sorry, but I don’t know any stories.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear -
So why a woman did the same should be judged different … well, women always is. Judged different, I mean.
Elizabeth Bear -
A woman in the West? You show me one who doesn’t drink, and I’ll show you one that wants to.
Elizabeth Bear
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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.
Elizabeth Bear -
That night, he kept activating the readout from his chip on the mobile’s login screen: Enfranchised.
Elizabeth Bear -
The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace.
Elizabeth Bear -
I wished I could offer her tea. You don’t think about it, but all those little fusses we make over company have their purposes. They give us something to do with our hands and our anxiousness until everybody settles in and starts having fun.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear
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You know, every time a vampire says he doesn't believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames.
Elizabeth Bear -
Sometimes the truth, told right, was the best lie.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear -
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.
Elizabeth Bear