You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.

It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

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

They stared at her curiously, and she caught snatches of conversation in two or three languages. It wasn't hard to guess their content, and she smiled a bit primly. Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range - and with a coup to plan for the end.

Wikipedia is so dangerous. You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in [Japanese] anime.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?