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

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.

Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.

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.

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

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.