Dust Quotes

“To know all is not to forgive all. It is
to despise everybody. —QUENTIN CRISP”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Memory is a spiderweb. It hangs in a corner and collects dust. Until you need it to catch a fly.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“How quickly the years fall away and the passage of time ceases meaning. We have each a purpose: we are bred to it, engineered for it, or we are drawn to it out of some fathomless innate longing that we cannot explain. Some unlucky few must discover—or create—it on their own, but those are rarer in these days, when by the grace of the forebears we are manufactured to our place in the order of the world. We have our destinies. We race for them, fight for them, fulfill them. Or we fail them. Listen, Perceval. Do you hear your long immortal life stretched out before you, before the stars? I have so much to teach you, my dear. The young do not believe in endings. They do not believe in death. They do not believe in time. Everything takes forever to happen, and twenty years is a long time. Under those circumstances, the apocalypse can seem sexy. Death is a fetish, a taste of the edge. It is not real. And so the days are long, and though time holds us green and dying, we cannot yet feel the drag of our chains hauling us forward to the end. But the old, Perceval. The old have forgiven time. Whatever time you may have is too little. If you live a thousand years—as I nearly have, and you surely will—it does not matter. Unless you have given up, laid down your tools, and folded idle hands to wait, beloved, you will still be in the middle of something when you die. The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it. And that is fine and just. For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Rien thought she was speaking to comfort herself as muc as to comfort Rien, and found that, in itself, strangely…well, comforting.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“The devil smiled: a slight man, unassuming, his hands knotted in the pockets of his beautiful coat.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“He wondered if she knew she’d just given him a command and what passed for his heart leaped.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“His captain of desire stood on the empty bridge, cloaked in her shadow, bright wings, and ran her hands away from her heart of either side, stroking the rail.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Maybe you could feel all sorts of things, all of them mutually contradictory.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Maybe she, Rien, should become a sorcerer. Or an angel. Then she could be an asshole, too, and if anybody commented on it, she could shrug and present her union card.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“How convenient, she thought, how freeing to be able to embrace the role of necromancer, trickster, betrayer. How it must release one from the bounds of common courtesy and right behavior. What a romantic series of excuses.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Rien took her and, reminding herself that falling for strangers simply because they looked like Perceval was stupid. Although Perceval would never want her, and wouldn’t holding on be stupider, still?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Do not believe in angels, Rien Conn, for they are all corrupted by the lies of the Builders, as your forebears were corrupted, too.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Had he robbed her of all joy forever? Or of all trust in her joy, which amounted to the same thing?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“How would she know, in the end, what was her desire and what was given her?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“They were deep within the world, and its hungry latticework structure had consumed the available light.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“If she could externalize, make the emotion other, she would not believe it.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Watching Benedick and Tristen trade glances made her feel even more like a child, and that was not okay.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Beloved,” he said. “Claim me, and I will do your will. I am yours by right, through the line of your foremothers and forefathers. Only let me own you. Perceval. My darling.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Jacob Dust,” he said. “Shipmind, shipsoul. Synthetic sapience. Distributed man. At your service, beloved.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“When Rien brought Perceval into Dust’s embrace, she was cold.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Sometimes people said an obvious thing, and what they meant by it wasn’t obvious at all.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“From here, she could observe the structure of the Jacob’s Ladder. She had a confused idea of lattices and bulbous habitats, of corridors, threading asymmetrically over the surfaces of anchores and domaines. Of gray metal and patchy paint. Now she saw the world in all its incomprehensible vastness, like a grandly rotating three-dimensional spiderweb, and the complexity bewildered her.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“She wanted to save Rien from any hurt, but there were some hurts you could rescue no one from.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“If beaks could smirk, she would have sworn him to be smirking.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“He seemed far too small to be the source of the air of wicked malice that surrounded him, but Dust knew better.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“They met where their edges brushed in one of the voids in the world’s great Tinkertoy structure.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Is that why they’re squabbling over her? They’re trying to marry an heir to the throne? I’m sorry, Tristen, but that’s like some medieval play.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust