36 quotes
“If I got assassinated now,” he shrugged helplessly, “my father would kill me.”
Brothers in Arms (1989)
“Power is safety.”
“Let me give you a hint,” said Miles. “There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure.”
Brothers in Arms (1989)
So. This one has never struck a man for real before. Nor killed either, I wager. Oh, little virgin, are you ever in for a bloody deflowering.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
The will to be stupid is a very powerful force—
Brothers in Arms (1989)
What the hell was HQ thinking of? It seemed extraordinarily obtuse even for them.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
“You have the instincts of a gentleman, Ivan,” said Miles, absorbed in breaking into the coded files. “How did you ever get into security?
Brothers in Arms (1989)
I’m not responsible for my weird ancestors. Quite the reverse. Exactly the inverse.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
“You’re pretty damn casual about it.”
“Early conditioning. Total strangers trying to kill me make me feel right at home.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
He felt like a man trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of live pieces, that moved and changed shape at random intervals with tiny malicious giggles.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
I have taken up the art of bonsai for a hobby. The ancient Japanese are said to have worked on a single tree for as long as a hundred years. Or perhaps it only seemed like it.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
The building had a strange hermetically-sealed flavor to it, redolent to Miles’s experienced nose as paranoid security in action. Ah, yes, a planet’s embassy is that planet’s soil. Feels just like home.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
It’s so damned useless! The dead hand of the past goes on jerking the strings by galvanic reflex, and we poor puppets dance—nothing is served, not us, not him, not Komarr…
Brothers in Arms (1989)
“No, no, never send interim reports,” said Miles. “Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must then either obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem.”
Brothers in Arms (1989)
They’re my officers, dammit, not my harem, Miles’s thought snarled silently. But no Barrayaran officer of Destang’s age would see it that way. Some attitudes couldn’t be changed; they just had to be outlived.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
“The revolt,” breathed Galen almost to himself, “must not die.”
“Even if everybody in it dies? ‘It didn’t work, so let’s do it some more’? In my line of work, they call that military stupidity. I don’t know what they call it in civilian life.”
Brothers in Arms (1989)
He did not attempt to capture her hands. He did not make a single move that might embarrass them both. Old friends were harder to come by than new lovers.
Oh, my oldest friend.
Still. Always.
Brothers in Arms (1989)