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.

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.

Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.

I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.

There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.