"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."

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

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.

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

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