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.

There were idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality.

"Cultural hegemony is based on conformity," he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. "Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions—or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren't one of us, you're one of them."

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.

"Hypocrite," she said. But she laughed. "Doesn't it get tiring being so damned morally superior all the time?"

Depression is realism.

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.

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

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

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

The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall.

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.

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.