If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

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.

When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, "He didn't hit me."

You have to be careful who you let define your good.