Top 120 Elizabeth Bear Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

2. “Rudeness is a weak person’s imitation of strength.”

— Elizabeth Bear

3. “Friends don’t keep score.” Because friends don’t have to keep score, my da would of said. Friends just pitch in as needed, as they can.”

— Elizabeth Bear

4. “The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point. There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren’t paying attention.”

— Elizabeth Bear

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

— Elizabeth Bear

6. “You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway.”

— Elizabeth Bear

7. “Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.”

— Elizabeth Bear

8. “Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when they speak the truth they are not believed::.”

— Elizabeth Bear

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

— Elizabeth Bear

10. “The harpy smiles. A harpy’s smile is an ugly thing, even seen edge-on. The harpy says, You do not have the power to make me not alone, Desiree.”

— Elizabeth Bear

11. “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. I.”

— Elizabeth Bear

12. “It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. It’s a tendency, along with self-pity, that I use my rightminding to control.”

— Elizabeth Bear

13. “Them as work hardest get no respect for it – women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics – and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day’s labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family’s bellies is all about.”

— Elizabeth Bear

14. “The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings.”

— Elizabeth Bear

15. “Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.”

— Elizabeth Bear

16. “BLINDSIGHT is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride.”

— Elizabeth Bear

17. “There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake.”

— Elizabeth Bear

18. “Girls in my profession know a little too much about men. The ones who want to know a woman as a person are fewer than you’d hope, and most of those don’t even realize it about themselves. They don’t care who a woman is, or what she’s scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear.”

— Elizabeth Bear

19. “Women have more of that patience, as a class. That ain’t because we’re born with it, though. It’s because we’re schooled to it and taught early that if we don’t have it we won’t never win.”

— Elizabeth Bear

20. “That I wasn’t summoned to report for administrative endoscopy was possibly the best indicator possible of how bad things were.”

— Elizabeth Bear

21. “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. The.”

— Elizabeth Bear

22. “Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.”

— Elizabeth Bear

23. “I don’t want what you want,” I said. “And I’m not going to help you. I don’t even want to argue with you, because while I know that human beings are capable of assimilating, adopting, internalizing, integrating, and identifying with new sets of ideas – because we have, multiple times in the history of the species – I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care what you think, because you are an awful person and you want awful things.”

— Elizabeth Bear

24. “And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.”

— Elizabeth Bear

25. “When he arrived, he found that this was true. New York was no less impressive for being mostly fictional. Of course, the place was lousy with writers.”

— Elizabeth Bear

26. “Art isn’t really about raw unmediated access to reality: that’s reality. You get that at the bus stop. Art is about interpreting reality, pointing up certain aspects of it, focusing attention. Editing.” Most.”

— Elizabeth Bear

27. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

28. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

29. “A barn owl was perched atop the refrigerator.”

— Elizabeth Bear

30. “Lindy-hop could go back to being just a social thing. But where she belonged in life After the Meteor, was here. Here, she made a difference. Sprained ankle and all.”

— Elizabeth Bear

31. “Spooky,” I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.”

— Elizabeth Bear

32. “I heard that, too. Nope. I’m an animal behaviorist. Here to assess recent changes in communication patterns. You in whale processing?”

— Elizabeth Bear

33. “We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.”

— Elizabeth Bear

34. “Most of the people who fail in what they want to accomplish do so because they underestimate who they are. When they don’t believe they can succeed at something, they have little chance.”

— Elizabeth Bear

35. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

36. “One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.”

— Elizabeth Bear

37. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

38. “The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say “please” and “thank you” same as any mother’s son.”

— Elizabeth Bear

39. “The words were low, more shape than breath.”

— Elizabeth Bear

40. “A good thing they didn’t know I was traveling with a trio of warrior women. I wouldn’t have stood a chance alone.”

— Elizabeth Bear

41. “Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we’re basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us.”

— Elizabeth Bear

42. “You know,” he said, “every time a vampire says he doesn’t believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames.”

— Elizabeth Bear

43. “Marshal Reeves, watching me, snorted. “Live and learn, child,” he said. “Everybody’s worthy of respect.”

— Elizabeth Bear

44. “After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up. The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Traveling thousands of miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam. The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even by ray-guns.”

— Elizabeth Bear

45. “If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?”

— Elizabeth Bear

46. “Sometimes the truth, told right, was the best lie.”

— Elizabeth Bear

47. “You’d never break this one. You’d never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile.”

— Elizabeth Bear

48. “Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I.”

— Elizabeth Bear

49. “Angelo,” he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia – the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain – and waking.”

— Elizabeth Bear

50. “Mostly, Irizarry knew anger was a waste of time and energy. It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t fix anything. It couldn’t bring back anything that was lost. People, lives. The sorts of things that got washed away in the tides of time. Or were purged, whether you wanted them gone or not.”

— Elizabeth Bear