Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.
For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.
The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.
There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.
Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.
The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.
The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.
There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.
Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.
I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe." "'Know thyself.'" "We try, sir.
The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.
I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.
Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.
It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.
I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is the higher achievement.
I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.
My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.
I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.
Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.
I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.
Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.
I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.
Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.
We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.
Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.
The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.
Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.
Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it.
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
I'm sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.
Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.
As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor
It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.
If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, choose learning. It works most of the time.
It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.