129 Quotes by Elizabeth Bear

But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I’d been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity.

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.

Eavesdropping’s a sin, but ignorance is fatal. Take your pick.

Butter wouldn’t have melted my smile, I swear.

The greenhouse – distant cousin, Ida, reportedly something of a botanist. The bed where we conceived Lily: Great-great-great-great-Aunt Minerva. Aunt Augustine’s dish set isn’t just an heirloom – it really is Aunt Augustine.

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.

Just as well, as it saved me having to invoke privacy, or bite. Metaphorically speaking. Biting a colleague is probably grounds for dismissal, even – especially? – in a massively multispecies, massively multicultural work environment.

If you have to constantly alter your natural mental state to survive a situation, doesn’t it follow that the situation is toxic?

Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone. They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.