If he ever does do himself in, I’m betting it’ll be something that involves large explosions. And lots of innocent bystanders, probably.
At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.
Yes. A bloody serious one. Desertion in the heat of battle,” said Miles. “If he gets extradited home, the penalty’s quartering. Technically.” “That doesn’t sound so bad.” Hathaway shrugged. “He’s been quartered in my recycling center for two months. It could hardly be worse. What’s the problem?” “Quartering,” said Miles. “Uh – not domiciled. Cut in four pieces.” Hathaway stared, shocked. “But that would kill him!
The future is happening right here, every day. You can swim or you can drown, but you can’t choose not to be in the flood. I suppose the real insight is that it’s always been that way.
Men write poems to the objects of our desire in order to lure them closer.” “How practical. In that case, you’d think men would write more poems to ladies’ private parts.” “The ladies would hit us. Lips are a safe compromise, being as it were a stand-in or stepping-stone to the greater mysteries.
If anyone was sane here, he swore it was by accident.
We just try to go from day to day. Surprising where you can end up, that way.
I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next that counts most.
Successes are secret and thankless, failures are splashy and gain you only blame.
I will tell you, parenting is a team sport. You need backup, reserves.
Save me from the virtuous.
She turned for her kitchen, mentally revising her planned family dinner to include a Vor lord from the Imperial capital. White wine? Her limited experience of the breed suggested that if you could get them sufficiently sloshed, it wouldn’t matter what you fed them.
He did arrange to dine over at the Vorthys’s three times, and have Ekaterin and Nikki to meals at Vorkosigan House twice, before the wedding week hit and all his meals – even breakfasts, good God – were bespoken. Still, his timetable was not as onerous as Gregor’s and Laisa’s, which Lady Alys and ImpSec between them had laid out in one-minute increments.
Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.
All happy endings are ultimately an illusion created by stopping short.
I think it is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one’s god.” Umegat emptied his cup. “The gods love their great-souled men and women as an artist loves fine marble, but the issue isn’t virtue. It is will. Which is chisel and hammer.
Then she said, “You go on. You just go on. There’s nothing more to it, and there’s no trick to make it easier. You just go on.” “What do you find on the other side? When you go on?” She shrugged. “Your life again. What else?
All her old thoughts seemed as thin and ragged as a piece of knitting made and ripped out and made and ripped out again until all the threads were frayed, growing ever more worn, but never larger.
Commodore Koudelka had just taken a mouthful of wine to chase his last bite of salmon. The atomized spray arced nearly to Delia, seated across from her father. A lungful of wine in a man that age was an alarming event in any case; Olivia patted his back in hesitant worry, as he buried his reddening face in his napkin and gasped. Drou half-pushed her chair back, as she hesitated between going up around the table to assist her husband or, possibly, down the table to strangle Mark.
There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity.