285 quotes
The only happy people she saw coming out of the place were a young couple, the man carrying a crying baby. Maternity wards are different, Nellie thought as she went past them. I bet they’re the only place in a hospital where people win instead of losing.
Southern Victory (1997)
Impasse. Stuart hated impasses. He hated ambiguity of any kind. The older he got, the more ambiguity he saw in the world. He hated that, too.
Southern Victory (1997)
It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.
Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place.
Southern Victory (1997)
What did he do for fun? Anything? Poor bastard, Sam thought. Zwilling probably got his kicks telling other people what to do. If that wasn’t a dead-end street, Sam had never seen one.
Southern Victory (1997)
“I know something you don’t know.”…
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” Fishbein bristled at the very idea.
“I know you talk too goddamn much.”
Southern Victory (1997)
When a politician, which was what the president of the CSA had long since become, said he was personally in sympathy with something, Jackson had learned, he meant the opposite.
Southern Victory (1997)
Cincinnatus stared at him. That had to be the most cynical assessment he'd ever heard in his life, and he'd heard a lot of them. But, along with the cynicism, it made a lot more sense than he wished it did.
Southern Victory (1997)
“Won’t it be fine, getting to spend Christmas somewhere near the edge of civilization?”
“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp agreed enthusiastically. “If El Paso isn’t civilization, at least it’s on the railroad line to it.”
Southern Victory (1997)
He’d escaped the last dragnet as much by luck as by anything else. You could tell a man not to be stupid, and maybe—if he wasn’t stupid to begin with—he’d listen. But how the devil could you tell a man not to be unlucky?
Southern Victory (1997)
If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.
Southern Victory (1997)
She hated the calendar, hated the mirror and what it showed her every morning. A handsome woman, that’s what you are. She would almost rather have been ugly. Then she wouldn’t have to remember the beauty she had been not so long ago.
Southern Victory (1997)
Quantity had a quality of its own.
Southern Victory (1997)
Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.
Southern Victory (1997)
When you got past fifty, you had to take care of yourself the way you took care of a motorcar. You’d break down if you didn’t, and replacement parts for your carcass were mighty hard to come by.
Southern Victory (1997)
Like any Vice President, Charlie La Follette was the very definition of an unknown quantity.
Southern Victory (1997)
If Earl Eyvind wanted to talk nonsense, he was welcome to, as far as Hamnet was concerned.
If he wanted anyone else to take him seriously when he did…that was another story altogether.
Opening of the World (2007)
He'd have a hell of a time getting anyone to work for him if people knew he might sell them out when that looked like a profitable thing to do.
If you had scruples about such things, you didn't belong in Intelligence in the first place.
Southern Victory (1997)
Potter studied him. “I never have figured out how smart you are, Featherston, but you’ve made it plain you’re shrewd enough and to spare. If you hadn’t made the fatal mistake of being right at the wrong time, we might have the same rank by now.”
Southern Victory (1997)
“Is it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.
“Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind.
Southern Victory (1997)
He thought the army could get along without lieutenants much more easily than it could without sergeants. Lieutenants, no doubt, would disagree with him—but what the hell did lieutenants know? If they knew anything, they wouldn't have been lieutenants.
Southern Victory (1997)