Ancestral Night Quotes

“There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“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. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Conspiracy theories are really attractive. Figuring out patterns is one of the things that gets your brain to give you a nice dose of chemical reward, the little ping of dopamine and whatever else that keeps you smiling. As a result, your brain is pretty good at finding patterns, and at disregarding information that doesn’t fit. Which means it’s also pretty good at finding false patterns, and at confirmation bias, and a bunch of other things that can be fatal. Our brains are also really good at making us the center of a narrative, because it’s what we evolved for.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Spooky,” I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“I don’t want what you want,” I said. “And I’m not going to help you. I don’t even want to argue with you, because while I know that human beings are capable of assimilating, adopting, internalizing, integrating, and identifying with new sets of ideas—because we have, multiple times in the history of the species—I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care what you think, because you are an awful person and you want awful things.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Why didn’t you mention how you were feeling?” “Because it’s feelings,” I said. “And feelings are terrible.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Let us go hurtling around the galaxy thwarting evil, shall we?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Maybe all obligate carnivores are essentially the same. Can I eat that? Is it going to eat me? Is it a toy?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“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.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.
Because anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.

Because the anger at having been wronged... doesn't vanish because you say to someone, "I forgive you." Rather forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.

But anger can also make you sick, if you're exposed to it for too long.... The anger itself can be your reason for living, and feeding it can be your only goal....”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“I kind of unplugged from the idea that you might want to revolutionize a system that mostly works because it chafes you in one particular spot.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“I watched the patterns of light sparkle across her back.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“We cannot choose where we come from, but we can choose where we are going, and we can choose the routes we're willing to take to try to get there.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Anger is an inoculant. It gets your immune system working against bullshit.
But anger can also make you sick, if you’re exposed to it for too long. That same caustic anger that can inspire you to action, to defend yourself, to make powerful and risky choices… can eat away at you. Consume your self, vulnerabilities,flesh, heart, future if you stay under the drip too long. The anger itself can become your reason for living, and feeding it can be your only goal. In the end, you’ll feed yourself to it to keep the flame alive, along with everyone around you.
Anger is selfish like any flame. And so, like any flame, it must be shielded, contained, husbanded while it is useful and banked or extinguished when it is not.”
― Elizabeth bear, Ancestral Night

“Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”
“Why do they need to?”
She blinked at me. I thought she was honestly puzzled. She shook her head and said, “But if they don’t work—”
I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just… churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Sure, but there’s… exploitation with consent and without it, I guess? Not all relationships are parasitic.”
“Yes,” he said. “Some are commensal. But I also consider this: as long as there have been exploited classes, the world has been looking for ways to keep those exploited classes from striving. Better to keep them from even feeling striving. Bleed them, starve them, terrorize them into learned helplessness, seduce them into Stockholm syndrome so they police themselves. Provide them with drugs—legal or illegal— and then use the sequelae of those addictions to control them further. Give them a minimum comfortable living so they’re not motivated to overthrow the government. There are ways, and some ways are more ethical than others.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“It’s hard not to like someone who’s genuinely interested in you. Or genuinely interested in things, in general.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“Was this what having an identity felt like? Was this being someone? Feeling like there was a core of who you were beyond which you could not be altered? Feeling . . . continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“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, Ancestral Night

“I’m not concerned about any terrible things you might have done,” he said quietly. “I’m concerned about the terrible things that happened to you.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“Anger is an inoculant. It gets your immune system working against bullshit.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night