Anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess.
Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.
Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.
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.
It's never too late while you're breathing.
I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!
All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.
Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?" "Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge.
The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.
The Lady of Spring must love you dearly.
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
Roic said nothing, firmly.
It was all sympathetic magic. When you couldn't do something truly useful, you tended to vent the pent-up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.
It's so obviously bogus, no one will look for a second layer of, er, bogusity.
Cordelia shivered, and Oliver glanced at her in concern. Cold, Cordelia? You shouldn't be standing around wet.
If there's no game, isn't winning a pretty meaningless concept?
I have to find a boat. Somehow.
I'm frightened all the time, yet I can't wish myself elsewhere.
Quite the reverse, since innocence based in ignorance was unfit to protect itself.
The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.
Are you glad, or sorry? About children? She glanced at his face. He seemed to have no awareness of having hit a sore point dead on. They just haven't come my way, I guess.
As had she, she supposed, but given that she was Aral's wife, very few men who weren't obviously insane had ever bothered her with unwanted advances. Although her own social obliviousness had doubtless also helped smooth things over.
It must be quite a shock to suddenly find out you're pregnant, seventeen times over—at your age, too.
If you don't understand something, you should just try to learn more, that's all.
Yes," Vorkosigan agreed, "I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.
It could be surprisingly hard to counter Plain Stupid. Even by heroic measures.
People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.
Are you saying I should run after her?
Send a patroller to check, said Miles a little tightly. Remembering he was supposed to be a diplomat, he added, If you please. Teris.
I'm very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.
One gives you the shirt off his back, mused Des, and the other offers to help you bury bodies. I do believe you have made some new friends, Pen!
I'd storm heaven for you, if I knew where it was.
I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.
Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.
The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.
Don't promote your troubles beyond your rank.
If you think safety is expensive, try pricing an accident, as the sign says.
For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
You try to give away what you want yourself.
We cannot protect anyone from being alive, Master Bosha. No matter how much we might wish to.
If only one didn't know that at the secret heart of all such organizations, corporations and governments alike, it still came down to a finite number of fallible people talking to each other . . .
Des said reluctantly at last, Pray to your god. He's the only other one in here besides us.
You must learn to give, from sufficiency, not only take, from neediness.
Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.
He smiled, recapturing her hand. A very wise woman once told me—you just go on. I've never encountered any good advice that didn't boil down to that, in the end. Not even my father's. I want to be with you always, so you can make me laugh myself well.
I'm not panicking. I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining.
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.
