Top 120 Elizabeth Bear Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sanchez has always heard he’s a good cop, maybe even a decent man. The latter’s more common than the former; power breeds abuse.”

— Elizabeth Bear

52. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

53. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

54. “All iron comes from stars,” Seeker replied, her hand still not quite brushing the hilt of the blade. “It’s the last element they can burn before they go nova. Iron’s the skeletons of stars, and it’s what makes our blood red. I.”

— Elizabeth Bear

55. “Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn’t make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.”

— Elizabeth Bear

56. “The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace.”

— Elizabeth Bear

57. “Anchorage, which is about the stupidest thing you ever could get to naming a harbor. I mean, why not just call it Harbor, like it was the only one ever?”

— Elizabeth Bear

58. “Let us go hurtling around the galaxy thwarting evil, shall we?”

— Elizabeth Bear

59. “The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.”

— Elizabeth Bear

60. “I am the Sovereign of Iss!” the girl declared. “And you are the daughter of Ciwril Xidyla! They had better listen to us.”

— Elizabeth Bear

61. “Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable.”

— Elizabeth Bear

62. “Though I am otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me.”

— Elizabeth Bear

63. “What was a book? Not just ink and fiber and stitchery: a series of processes. To a wizard, it was not a static object – but a human thought caught and bound, made concrete through sacred technology. Magic, then, and a deep form of it.”

— Elizabeth Bear

64. “A woman in the West? You show me one who doesn’t drink, and I’ll show you one that wants to.”

— Elizabeth Bear

65. “I liked her scowl and I liked her freedom to wear it.”

— Elizabeth Bear

66. “Impatience and cutting corners: it’s the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.”

— Elizabeth Bear

67. “Once you absorb the maths, it’s all perfectly clear.”

— Elizabeth Bear

68. “Why didn’t you mention how you were feeling?” “Because it’s feelings,” I said. “And feelings are terrible.”

— Elizabeth Bear

69. “Amazing what people can fail to see when it’s a man doing it to a woman, even a respectable-looking woman.”

— Elizabeth Bear

70. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

71. “Anyway, one of the first things you learn in space is not to thrash. If you have nothing constructive to do, the most constructive thing you can do is often nothing at all. In a mindful sense, I mean. Thrashing is the thing that gets people killed. Not sitting still.”

— Elizabeth Bear

72. “Electricity is a remarkably simple – though dangerous – animal.”

— Elizabeth Bear

73. “I don’t believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?”

— Elizabeth Bear

74. “The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals. It’s who we are when nobody is looking.”

— Elizabeth Bear

75. “Shall I compare thee to a docking ring? Thou art more beautiful and more temperate, though that’s not really hard when you’re talking about an airlock whose external temperature is measured on the low end of kelvins. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could have been happier with anything or felt more raw, unfettered love than I did for that docking ring, right then. Free and with my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and sighed.”

— Elizabeth Bear

76. “I don’t know if it was the excitement that did it, but by the time we started our tiptoe across the icy, rutted skid yard to that shed Priya had quit shivering, but I was trembling like a marriage license in a young man’s hand.”

— Elizabeth Bear

77. “When you are a certain age or when you have lost certain things and people, Aimee’s crippling grief will make a terrible poisoned dark sense.”

— Elizabeth Bear

78. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

79. “How will you know that you love, if there is no terror of losing? Is it love at all, if there is no risk? If it is safe?”

— Elizabeth Bear

80. “But Doc knew that was the key to successful lying. People judged what other people would do by what they themselves would do. You could tell a hell of a lot about a man by what he assumed others got up to. If you’re looking for a thief, bet on the man who’s always accusing his neighbors.”

— Elizabeth Bear

81. “Maybe all obligate carnivores are essentially the same. Can I eat that? Is it going to eat me? Is it a toy?”

— Elizabeth Bear

82. “For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools.”

— Elizabeth Bear

83. “I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional computational linguist.”

— Elizabeth Bear

84. “There are multiple claims to Mr. Smart.”

— Elizabeth Bear

85. “They were also the person who kept the ox-sector Emergency Department of the largest hospital in the galaxy purring like an only slightly dyspeptic cat.”

— Elizabeth Bear

86. “I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.”

— Elizabeth Bear

87. “I wished I had time to throw confetti and sing songs about the contact with Linden, but when the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there’s time to bake.”

— Elizabeth Bear

88. “Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge the existence of abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can – social, biological, what have you.”

— Elizabeth Bear

89. “Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran.”

— Elizabeth Bear

90. “Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They’ll figure out a pattern even if all you’ve got are random data points that don’t actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians. And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.”

— Elizabeth Bear

91. “When the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there’s time to bake.”

— Elizabeth Bear

92. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bear

93. “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. We’d at least, by then, developed the tech to fix our brains so we could accept emotionally what logic should have showed us.”

— Elizabeth Bear

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

— Elizabeth Bear

95. “So I am going to trust you. I want you to know that if it turns out you’re playing me, I’m going to spend the whole endless time the black hole is spaghettifying both of us being extremely disappointed in you.”

— Elizabeth Bear

96. “I should of been chewing on my words some, so everybody else would have had a better chance of swallowing them.”

— Elizabeth Bear

97. “Few are the memories which are more than a handful of dust, to be let run through the fingers.”

— Elizabeth Bear

98. “The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.”

— Elizabeth Bear

99. “Scared of Farweather. Scared of whether or not my gravity trick was going to work if there was another living body in the way of it, or whether Farweather would have better control – or whether the ship itself would intervene with some kind of failsafe to protect her. And I was scared as well of what I might do if my plan worked and I actually did get the upper hand.”

— Elizabeth Bear

100. “She is covered in sand, only on her right side. There are no clouds. She is alone. Seonag is used to being alone, even when she is surrounded by people.”

— Elizabeth Bear