There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
Miles added it to his life’s lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.
Not that I haven’t leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It’s sustaining the altitude that defeats me.
You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.
The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.
Too late, he recalled Miles’s dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.
I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!
Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.
Hi, I’m a hero, but I can’t tell you why. It’s classified.
The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.
I’m very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.
Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.
When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they’ll be called on to do before the next chance.
As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor.
The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.
I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.