Elizabeth Bear Quotes
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The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.
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Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.
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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.
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That night, he kept activating the readout from his chip on the mobile’s login screen: Enfranchised.
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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.
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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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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.
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Few are the memories which are more than a handful of dust, to be let run through the fingers.
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He made a noise she recognized, one that meant he was organizing whatever multidimensional information lattices inhabited his mental space into linear strings amenable to transmission through that inadequate medium, language.
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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.
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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.
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You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway.
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So why a woman did the same should be judged different … well, women always is. Judged different, I mean.
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Rudeness is a weak person's imitation of strength.
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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.
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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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You ever hear somebody blithely say something so amazingly plastered over with bullshit it just makes your eyes bug?
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Nobody called her Moggy except for Mother, either. Nobody ever called me Kittycat except my family, and people who were looking for a fight.
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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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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.
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Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable.
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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.
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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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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.