Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

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

If there's no game, isn't winning a pretty meaningless concept?

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.

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.

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.