543 quotes
You know, if you’re trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it’s a lot easier to hit your targets if you don’t yell going through the door.
The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
A Civil Campaign (1999)
Yeah, so I’m short. But wait’ll you see me dance.
The Mountains of Mourning (1989)
Pain hurts, sir. I don’t court it.
The Vor Game (1990)
I smell diplomacy. Miles grimaced.
Diplomatic Immunity (2002)
Dying is easy. Surviving is hard.
Penric's Mission (2016)
"It is not, you know, that you lie well, cousin. It’s merely that no one is foolhardy enough to call you on it. This may have given you an inflated idea of your skill at dissimulation."
The Hallowed Hunt (2005)
In all, in truth, it was a problem for another day, Ivan decided. When life and chance handed you an afternoon as idyllic as this one promised to be, it seemed profoundly ungrateful not to pay attention.
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012)
“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)
Any community’s arm of force—military, police, security—needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
Barrayar (1991)
Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Then time ran out—no. Time ran on. There was no end to time. But you come to the end of yourself, and time runs on, and leaves you.
A Civil Campaign (1999)
There was no way he could anticipate every contingency. When the time came to leap in faith, whether you had your eyes open or closed or screamed all the way down or not made no practical difference.
The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
She’d made it clear that Things Would Be Done Properly.
The problem came in defining the term Properly.
A Civil Campaign (1999)
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)
You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.
Paladin of Souls (2003)
There are two possible ways to solving a dilemma, in justice or elsewhere; begin with the facts, and follow out their logic where it leads one, or begin with the desired outcome, and reason backward to the necessary steps to achieve it.
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012)
"I would be considerably more impressed with your god, dy Cabon," said Ista through her teeth, "if He could have arranged one life's worth of simple protection in advance, rather than three hundred lives' worth of gaudy vengeance afterward."
Paladin of Souls (2003)
“Power is better than revenge,” suggested Miles, not flinching before her snake-cold, set face, her hot coal eyes. “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.”
The Borders of Infinity (1987)
I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)