If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

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

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

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.