I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

"It was suicide, wasn't it?" "In an involuntary sort of way," said Vorob'yev. "These Cetagandan political suicides can get awfully messy, when the principal won't cooperate." "Thirty-two stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they ever saw?" murmured Ivan, clearly fascinated by the gossip. "Exactly, my lord."

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.

Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.