Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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The older he got, the simpler the world was revealed to be.
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The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace.
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So it’s a good thing Connie sent me with a list, because otherwise I might wind up bewildered and wandering the aisles until I wasted away to a haint.
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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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I liked her scowl and I liked her freedom to wear it.
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I don’t believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?
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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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A woman in the West? You show me one who doesn’t drink, and I’ll show you one that wants to.
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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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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.
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The words were low, more shape than breath.
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We must create our children alive and fragile and pulsing with the hot blood that is so easy, so terribly easy to spill.
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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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I’m sorry, but I don’t know any stories.
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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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I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.
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As any parent can tell you, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open when you go looking for kids who are being unreasonably quiet. They’re probably doing something they don’t want you to see, and if they hear you coming, they’ll hide the evidence.
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No one is making me say this. No one is making me tell this story. Nobody’s ever been much good at making me say anything I hadn’t already made up my mind to say.
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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.
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I heard that, too. Nope. I’m an animal behaviorist. Here to assess recent changes in communication patterns. You in whale processing?
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...one must come to the understanding in the end that one was always insufficiently practiced, and yet one must sometimes act anyway. Practice itself was an act.
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I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten.
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How will you know that you love, if there is no terror of losing? Is it love at all, if there is no risk? If it is safe?
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The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.