Elizabeth Bear Quotes

I said, “It just seems weird that I’m in bed with somebody I’ve never met.”
As I said it I realized how foolish it was. Anytime you’re in bed with somebody, you’re in bed with everybody who came before you—everybody who hurt them, healed them, shaped them. All those ghosts are in the room.

We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future.

And I admit, I don’t like dying very much myself. But I look forward to Death herself, once the dying is over.

Any government founded on a political or religious agenda more elaborate than “protect the weak, temper the strong” is doomed to tyranny.

“Kill or be killed,” Vincent said, next best thing to a mantra.

Age had not yet defeated her on all fronts, though it was a war of attrition she knew she was fated to lose.

We claim the dignity of age, she thought, but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all.

He wouldn’t be much of a diplomat if he couldn’t lie with a straight face.

"You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God," he said, "the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn't would be a fucking good place to start."

Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs.

Kusanagi-Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out.

Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just…cut down trees?

While it is true that notoriety offers certain benefits, it is not by any means confirmed that those benefits compensate for the disadvantages.

Depression is realism.

The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin.