Whiskey and Water Quotes

“Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Kit bumped Matthew with his shoulder, the way, once upon a time, he might have nudged another friend.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Lies are stories.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“She smiled and leaned on him. It would have been nice to earn that smile. Nice to feel the trust, the partnership, the old friendship they had had. Nice to smile back, to reach out, and take her hand.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“The Queen’s voice had dropped, softened. Carel recognized it: the voice of the woman, not the Queen, unheard in seven years. In another circumstance, she might have found it beautiful.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“She had controlled him. Down to the breath he drew. He’d thanked her for it, and it hadn’t been enough for her. Fair enough. He had, after all, defied her in the end.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“If anything meant home and strength and heart and culture more to him than the New York Public Library lions, he couldn’t have named it.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“She tossed her hair behind her shoulder. Not a coquette’s gesture, but a queen’s.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Good Goth girls knew these things. Good comparative religion grad students knew them, too.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Christian smiled the sort of smile that vampires might affect, to hide their fangs.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Jane did not rise, and the angel did not settle. But the silence dragged taut between them as if they struggled over a rope, and in Michael’s eyes Jane saw all her sin and malfeasance, the small selfishnesses and the hubris that had nearly wrecked the world, reflected. The chill settled into her, hard and sharp as swallowed glass. She had failed and failed again, and all her failures were naked in her angel’s eyes.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“In any case, Prometheus is in the process of reinvention. I’d like to plead our case.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“The atmosphere of money enfolded Peese like cling film when he entered Jane’s apartment. It coated his skin, thick and silken; it slid down his throat like buttermilk. It intimidated.

It was meant to.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Loose crimson trousers wrapped her lower body, her bracelets and necklaces tinkling like glass bells as she breathed.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“The light through beech limbs dappled her long indigo-black torso, leafy transluscence, creating a diffuse green glow broken by dancing radiant rays.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“One does not call down archangels in my city, Detective, if one cares to go unnoticed.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Whatever confidence came to her when she gripped a knife didn’t serve her here.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Every question is the answer to someone else’s dilemma.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“His gratification was a chill stone on her breast.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“It was an old sick power, rich and nauseous and irrestible as any unhallowed love he’d ever known. It ran shivery caresses up the inside of his skin, weighed a stone like desire in his gut and groin.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“We’d prefer to see Faerie driven entirely from the iron world,” Jane said, abandoning her pretense of being an observer when the Bunyip stared at her. “And I want Matthew back. Unharmed. He’s too useful to be left wandering around uncontrolled.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Jane, he realized now, with an old familiar chill, had never lost her grip on his leash.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“A dark-haired young woman in bright sunflower barrettes brushed by Matthew; undressing him with a look that he profoundly ignored, though he wouldn’t have if he’d felt the fey iciness that a very particular, very exhausting sort of spell cloaked from both him and Kit.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“When all else failed, her grandmother Mary would have said, good manners never deserted one.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Marlowe patted Matthew on the shoulder, and Matthew found himself grinning in naked relief; notorious rakehell, sodomite, and playboy he might be remembered as, but lately Christopher Marlowe was the only person who seemed willing to touch Matthew without some implication lying predatory behind it.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Pray let us greet our host and the guest of honor, that I may receive my measure of scorn from each and we may be away.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“The devils bowed to one another, one cruel-eyed and smoking, rose petals sizzling under his footsteps, the other white and fair and wearing a crown of dancing shadows on his brow.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Somewhere, he found a smile that was positively sunny, and gave it to her.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“Of course I love him. I made him. And he came back through history to unmake me. You don’t get to fall out of love with the Devil.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water

“His poet would never disappoint him.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Whiskey and Water