Harry Turtledove

The artillery duel between U.S. and C.S. guns started up again, each side feeling for the other in the night. Listening to death fly back and forth overhead was almost like watching a tennis match, except both sides could serve at once and there could be more than one ball in the air at the same time.

It was an eminently sensible question. Moss didn't want good sense, though. He wanted to be told what he wanted to hear. That he was thinking like a three-year-old was a telling measure of how tired he was, but he was too tired to realize it.

A wise husband didn’t quarrel even when he was right. Quarreling when you knew you were wrong was a recipe for disaster.

As happened too often in politics, never turned out not to be so very long after all.

If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.

Sometimes convenience counted for more than ideology.

He'd have a hell of a time getting anyone to work for him if people knew he might sell them out when that looked like a profitable thing to do.

If you had scruples about such things, you didn't belong in Intelligence in the first place.

The exec usually did Captain Stein's dirty work for him. The skipper got the credit, the exec got the blame: an ancient Navy rule.

But then, how much of war was finding out the hard way what the other fellow had that you didn't know about ahead of time? Put that way, it sounded quietly philosophical. Put another way, it meant Sam was likely to get killed because some dimbulb in Philadelphia was asleep at the switch.

She was willing to give her life for her country. She wasn’t willing to throw it away.

Only two promotions really mattered: the one up from buck private and the one to general’s rank.

He still couldn't believe she was dead. She’d been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn't work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual’s vitality mattered not at all to it.