Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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Rudeness is a weak person's imitation of strength.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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I liked her scowl and I liked her freedom to wear it.
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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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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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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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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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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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The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace.
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If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?
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The older he got, the simpler the world was revealed to be.
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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?
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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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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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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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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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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.