Grail Quotes

“What I’m suggesting,” he offered, “is that people forget the reasoning behind a dogma, and eventually come to treat the dogma itself as holy writ.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“who worked in an office anymore? Who met face-to-face? Who commuted? But authority required trappings, and to some people archaicism still meant authority.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“How can I refuse an offer like that? We are all we have. And we are so small, and the night is so large.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Everyone loved and lost, and perhaps it took a necromancer to appreciate how truly universal that experience could be.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“I’m a tiger who does not care to hunt any longer.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Continuity of experience is an illusion, old man.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Serve your own self for a while.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“I used to make people like you as servants.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“It’s not the solar system they’ll claim, but eventually the universe. It might be lonely. It will be strange. Do you really want to be one of them?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Rien had been the beloved of Perceval, and so Nova, too, had loved the Captain beyond the love that Angels had been built to suffer.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“He’s not a villain,” Dorcas said, “He’s a hero who happens to be on the other side of the war.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“I don’t think you’ll get much argument that my personality could use amending.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“It is better to evolve than die.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“He was in there-all his ghosts and legends, all the twisted Gothic nonsense out of which he’d built a realm in the long dreaming time when the broken world orbited the shipwreck stars.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“We get along with carnivorous plants and talking screwdrivers. I don’t know what should be so hard about getting along with you.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“What weird things planets were.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Two planets of comparable size in an endless falling ballet around each other and their sun made for challenging close orbits, and Perceval was all too aware of the fragility of her old and battered world.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“The worst of it was, he had come to like the Jacobeans, in all their sophipathic insanity. They might be grotesaries, caricatures, larger than life and full of violence-but they were also shockingly generous and, sometimes, shockingly funny.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“The old ways-the old respect might no longer be enforced with terror, but enough of it lingered that Dust was no entirely bereft of hope for the future of Engine and the Conn family. They might have grown soft, but they had not entirely fallen apart.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“It was a relief to speak his native tongue, familiar words and known patterns that had settled into his bones with father’s milk and rooted deep.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“She had anticipated that the cultural disconnect would be vast, and she was only just coming to understand how vast it might be.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“This is the last moment of the world we know, isn’t it? This is history.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Agreeing with Conns was what you did with them.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“One cannot serve angels, Angel. One must own them.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Death was always a relative function, a complicated thing when you were dealing with angels or Exalt. People died in pieces, by increments, or were transformed into something else. For Means, death had meant something concrete, a hard limit.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Danilaw’s underlying genetic users meant his own emotional balance could stray from perfection and his inherited neurochemistry meant that his rightminding fell in need of more frequent-than-usual maintenance. Not enough to cause a social disadvantage, or free him from Obligations-but enough to make him wish sometimes it might.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“He did not think he’d ever seen her lie down to rest, or even claim a need for it.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“The smile that curved lovely lips made Tristen shiver with memory.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“As he watched, the kiss was completed. Mallory pressed pink lips over the head woman’s mouth, and Tristen could see the working between the corpse’s teeth. Mallory’s eyes closed, fingers fanning through brown hair to hold the head steady.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“The necromancer framed the dead woman’s eyes with soft fingertips, and leaned so close that Tristen felt as if he had interrupted a seduction.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail