Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
[Koudelka] looked back, “You?! I know you! You trust beyond reason!”[Cordelia] met his eyes steadily, “Yes, it’s how I get results beyond hope, as you may recall.
It’s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn’t even know you were aiming for.
I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.
Women shouldn’t be in combat,” said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. “Neither should men, in my opinion.
Modern warfare wasn’t supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan’s first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)
I’m afraid even ImpSec has no explanation for women’s tastes in men.
At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
Power is better than revenge. 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.
Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice – if not whether, then how, they may endure.
Don’t wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you’re best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don’t make children–children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too
And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?
Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.
The gods’ most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.
This wasn’t prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods.Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.
And the Bastard grant us… in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain’s peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.
You? I know you! You trust beyond reason.”She met his eyes steadily. “Yes. It’s how I get results beyond hope. As you may recall.
There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you. I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you.- Miles Vorkosigan
Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.
You must learn to give, from sufficiency, not only take, from neediness.
It’s true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.””Ah…quite. You are a man of acute insight.””That’s not insight. That’s a personal guarantee.
A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman’s breasts and cry—even if he is at a convenient height for it.
Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later.
Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there….
You want to be good. All right, I can understand that. But you have to be careful who you let define your good.
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you’ll be so close as to be living inside each other’s skins.
People do get hypnotized by the hard choices and stop looking at the alternatives. The will to be stupid is a powerful force
We see the world not as it is, but as we are.~Dag Redwing Hickory Bluefield
It’s just a thing. You deal with it.” “As in, one damn thing after another?””Yes, very like.
You go on. You just go on. There’s nothing more to it, and there’s no trick to make it easier. You just go on.””What do you find on the other side? When you go on?”She shrugged. “Your life again. What else?
We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn’t even know it.
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.
Not that I haven’t leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It’s sustaining the altitude that defeats me.
One foot in front of the other, wasn’t that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.
Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.
Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.
Anyway, if the Cetagandans really wanted to assassinate you, they’d hardly do it here. They’d slip something subtle under your skin that wouldn’t go off for six months, and then would drop you mysteriously and untraceably in your tracks
Miles added it to his life’s lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.
everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location.
And this was your friend?” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.
I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.
I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe.””‘Know thyself.'” “We try, sir.
The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.
That civet-jasmine blend you’re wearing tonight absolutely clashes with the third-level formal style of your dress, you know.
Her smile grew bitter as desert brine. “The gods may forgive Ista all day long. But if Ista does not forgive Ista, the gods may go hang themselves.
I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.
Lord X was a tyrant, not a revolutionary. He wanted to take over the system, not change it.
When I was a wee little kid,” remarked Roic, watching over their shoulders, “there was a time I thought that any skinny old man I saw was my grandfather. It was pretty confusing.
It wasn’t a case of storming heaven. It was a case of letting heaven storm you.
But personally, I think [sainthood] is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one’s god.
If there’s no game, isn’t winning a pretty meaningless concept?
He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.
It’s a . . . transcendental act. Making life. . . . ‘By this act, I bring one death into the world.’ One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between. . . . Our children change us . . . whether they live or not.
Hunting hawks did not belong in cages, no matter how much a man coveted their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They were far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.
The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.
I think 99 percent of women’s lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology – it doesn’t precede it.