Elizabeth Bear

"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."

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

"While it is true that notoriety offers certain benefits, it is not by any means confirmed that those benefits compensate for the disadvantages."

"We claim the dignity of age, she thought, but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all."

"And I admit, I don’t like dying very much myself. But I look forward to Death herself, once the dying is over."

"The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin."

"Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just…cut down trees?"

"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."

"Depression is realism."

"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."

"“Kill or be killed,” Vincent said, next best thing to a mantra."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"“You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God,” he said, “the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn’t would be a fucking good place to start.”"

"“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.”"