543 quotes
Oh hell. Have you fallen in love with this woman, idiot boy?
Um. Yeah.
He’d been falling for days, he realized in retrospect. It was just that he’d finally hit the ground.
Komarr (1998)
“They seem more like toys than jewels, but I have to admit, they’re striking.”
“Oh, yes, a typical tech toy. High-end this year, everywhere next year, nowhere after that, till the antiquarians’ revival.”
Komarr (1998)
“What’s a call girl?” asked Tej, her brows crimping in puzzlement.
“Uh…” Ivan sought a translation. “Like a Betan licensed practical sexuality therapist, only without the licensed and the therapy parts.”
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012)
I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given. They must be taken and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can’t be gifts.
A Civil Campaign (1999)
Yani seemed a time-traveler who had found out the hard way that he did not like his destination any better than his point of departure, failed to notice the one common factor was himself, and now could not go back.
Cryoburn (2010)
“No,” said his father, “you don’t have to smile. But if you’re really asking for advice from my accumulated experience, I’m saying Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”
A Civil Campaign (1999)
“We’ll never know the whole truth, I suppose,” said Venier.
Was that supposed to be a concession? “You can be told the whole truth all day long, but if you won’t believe it, then no, I don’t suppose you ever will never know it.”
Komarr (1998)
“We used to call the biowar intelligence and analysis section at ImpSec HQ the Nightmare Barn,” Miles reminisced. “In a large building full of pale, overcaffeinated men, they had a reputation as being the pastiest and the twitchiest.”
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016)
Oh yes. This was going to do well. If there was one thing Tsipis appreciated, it was a quick study. Ekaterin was one of those show once people whom Miles, in his mercenary days, had found more precious than unexpected oxygen in the emergency reserve.
A Civil Campaign (1999)
Words won't break bones seemed like the lying-est lie Barr had ever been told, as a child. Bones knit eventually, he knew from close personal experience. The scars of slander, an insult not just delivered but believed, might never heal in a lifetime.
Knife Children (2019)
All in all, it was probably a good thing these youths had no political interests. They were just the sort of people who started revolutions but could not finish them, their idealism betrayed by their incompetence.
Cetaganda (1996)
Lilly had promised him that her stimulants would buy him six hours of coherence, after which the metabolic bill would be delivered by hulking bio-thugs with spiked clubs, virtual repo-men for his neurotransmitter debt.
Mirror Dance (1994)
He found oddly little regret in his heart for his own lost life. He'd seen more of the world than most men ever did, and he'd had his chances, though the gods knew he'd made little enough of them. Marshaling his thoughts, as he sheltered under his covers, he realized with some wonder that his greatest dismay was for the work he'd be forced to leave undone.
The Curse of Chalion (2000)
The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real.
Shards of Honor (1986)
Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and material to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival—to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory—organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.
The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
Tolga guided him not to the morgue, but to a patient chamber alloted mostly to a dozen crippled old indigent men, some brought in to be healed, some to die. For a beggar, Pen was not entirely sure it was a better death than in an alley or under a bridge; death was never a comfortable process, despite cots and sheets and usually overworked attendants, and it took longer here.
Knot of Shadows (2021)
"...your soul is your own, now, to make of what you will. We are all of us, every one, our own works: we present our souls to our Patrons at the ends of our lives as an artisan presents the works of his hands."
Paladin of Souls (2003)
He knew now why they called it “falling in love.” There was the same nauseating vertigo of free fall, the same vast exhilaration, the same sick certainty of broken bones upon impact with a rapidly rising reality.
Cetaganda (1996)
The trick of handling horses isn’t to be faster than the horse, or stronger than the horse. That pits your weakness against his strengths. The trick is to be smarter than the horse. That pits your strength against his weakness, eh?
The Mountains of Mourning (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)