Machine Quotes

“So I am going to trust you. I want you to know that if it turns out you’re playing me, I’m going to spend the whole endless time the black hole is spaghettifying both of us being extremely disappointed in you.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals. It's who we are when nobody is looking.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“I wished I had time to throw confetti and sing songs about the contact with Linden, but when the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there’s time to bake.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They’ll figure out a pattern even if all you’ve got are random data points that don’t actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians. And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I’d been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“I wound up playing secret agent/detective/tour guide to a sexy robot. If that sounds like the sort of punishment that would be handed out in a particularly surrealist purgatory, congratulations. You’re not wrong.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“They were also the person who kept the ox-sector Emergency Department of the largest hospital in the galaxy purring like an only slightly dyspeptic cat.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Just as well, as it saved me having to invoke privacy, or bite. Metaphorically speaking. Biting a colleague is probably grounds for dismissal, even—especially?—in a massively multispecies, massively multicultural work environment.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Whatever the objects were, there were a lot of them. I did a little quick mental math and figured that there must be a thousand of them in this bay alone. They might be alive. Or at least, aliveable.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“The era of Terra’s history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the generation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“That I wasn’t summoned to report for administrative endoscopy was possibly the best indicator possible of how bad things were.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it’s gone. Like it never was. Like you can’t even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to. I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“When the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there's time to bake.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“No, worse. It had never existed. I had invented it; I had allowed myself to be deluded, because I had so badly wanted it to exist. I had wanted to belong to a thing. I had wanted to need and be needed. Why are we born needing impossible things? Why is it that we all have things we need to live that simply do not exist in the universe? A purpose in life. Unconditional love? Our emotional needs met? Ha. What cruel asshole thought this shit up?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. It’s a tendency, along with self-pity, that I use my rightminding to control.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Only exploitation under various systems all claiming to be different, but all amounting to the farming of the many to make wealthy the few. Serfdoms and indenturehood and chattel slavery.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Electricity is a remarkably simple—though dangerous—animal.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“-We eat our mates if we can catch them. Everybody's got some evolutionary baggage that winds up maladaptive in a sophont setting.-
"Valuable protein resource." I shrugged. "And it's not as if your species is designed for coparenting.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“But isn’t maturity—individual, or as a species—acknowledging when you or your ancestors have done wrong, and trying to do better, not one-upping each other on who has suffered more?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Ignoring your own needs constantly is selfish and makes a lot of work for other people.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Being angry is a skill I have a lot of experience with, though I worked pretty hard in my military years to learn not to tote anger around with me all the time. There’s constructive anger, which motivates you to get up off the ground and get things done. There’s righteous anger, which motivates you to protect the afflicted and downtrodden. There’s helpless anger, which just makes you feel useless and turns you mean.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Pain. I didn’t tell her that without it, I wouldn’t be able to stand up under gravity. I didn’t tell her that without it, either I would have to lie around in a haze of chemical analgesics, unable to focus my mind, or I would have to tune my body out to the point”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“It was something of a surprise to find it here, because if this were its shift—which it was not—I would have expected it to be in Cryo.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“That’s why we have checklists. Because all too often, everybody assumes that everybody else has thought of it already.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine