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41 " 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. "
― Elizabeth Bear , Ancestral Night (White Space #1)
42 " What can I say? We’re slow. "
43 " Such a wave of distaste that I could feel it through the senso, despite our incompatible neurologies. "
44 " Her name was Niyara, and she had green eyes, and she said she loved me. She said she was my best friend, that I was family to her. She said a lot of things. "
45 " I chose to trust, because my hormones were surging, and I was limerent and infatuated, and I wanted with all my heart and soul to believe. In us. "
46 " I knew she was a political radical, but when you’re nineteen that’s sexy. "
47 " It was possible to throw a little fold of space-time around yourself like a vampire vanishing into his swirl of cloak. "
48 " Part of being a community is being part of the governing body. Taking responsibility for its actions and helping to make choices the benefit all the citizenry. Taking responsibility for its well-being, just as you do when you’re part of a family. "
49 " You manage to disentangle yourself, but then you’re out in the hard, cold universe, and suddenly everybody is disagreeing with you-and you have no idea how to manage disagreement and how awful it makes you feel, having never experienced it at all. "
50 " I was too overwhelmed-and too focused on my job and its dangers-to let myself feel overawed. "
51 " I felt as if I had been navigating a vast space by touch alone, groping in the darkness, and suddenly I could see. "
52 " My new friend paced alongside on six slender legs, the two deadly looking raptorial manipulators folded against its forethorax, the more delicate ones waving gently in the air. "
53 " Even races as belligerent as my own had come around eventually. "
54 " Eventually, I realized I was wasting my time, and if I wanted to hide from humanity in a bottle, I was better off making it a titanium one with a warp drive and a couple of carefully selected companions. "
55 " Synethetic devashare isn’t expensive. You can print it from readily available components, if you are someplace with a permissive substance policy. But the good stuff-the nightmare stuff-that’s not the sort of thing that you can get just anywhere. It’s virulantly illegal everywhere with a government, as you’d hope any intoxicant from a murdered flesh of presumed would be. So it’s the sort of thing you heard rumors about the wealthy and dissolute obtaining, or try to obtain-the same way you hear rumors about certain debauched priveleged types throwing noncon kink parties and similiar nasty things. "
56 " And it proceeded to tell me the history of how the Synarche learned to be a patient suitor, because it turns out that making mistakes is how we grow up, whether we’re a multi-species alien utopia, or just some dude screwing up their first romance beyond believability. "
57 " You let your guard down to one person, pretty soon other people started creeping in over the razor wire and around the force fields, too. And then they inevitably hurt you, and what might have been a few chips and dents of your deflectors were working turned, instead into a full-sledged meteor storm, leaving behind cracked bones and big meaty gauges. "
58 " My people have a saying that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime. "
59 " it turns out that ten thousand amateurs taken on average are usually better at coming up with a workable solution than one expert is. Anybody that’s ever heard an unrehearsed crowd sing a familiar melody accurately has witnessed this in action. "
60 " It’s hard not to like someone who’s genuinely interested in you. Or genuinely interested in things, in general. "