Grail Quotes

“Perceval Conn glided through warm water, feeling the swirl and suck of eddying currents along her skin, over her scalp, through the tendrils of her unbound hair.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“What weird things planets were.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“How much of you has to die before you stop being you and become somebody else?”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“I’ve got a head so full of dead people I suspect whoever I started off as should be counted as one of them.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Death is my speciality, and you have my professional assurances that it’s not in any way permanent.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Strange to have his former apprentice treating with him as an equal now. Strange, and satisfying.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Cynric did not make merely human errors. Her mistakes were more on the epic scale, her failings those of demigods.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“In that expression, Dust glimpsed the woman she had not been, the woman whose body she now inhabited.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“Worthy or not, despised or adored, she was his and he was hers.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail

“You are a Conn, through and through, Ariane, and rotten with it. But it’s also possible that you are our only hope for survival.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Grail