Harry Turtledove

Hopes were only shadows that too often vanished in the pitiless light of reality.

Liv worried less about how important other people thought she was and more about things that really mattered.

Ulric Skakki’s smile was so charming, it made Hamnet distrust him on sight—as if he didn’t already.

He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world. Of course he did—she agreed with him.

“And if you don’t bet, how do you expect to win?”

Hamnet Thyssen didn’t look at things that way. To him, not betting meant you couldn’t lose. He hadn’t even thought of winning.

“Sometimes I think I don’t know everything that’s going on,” Ulric Skakki said in tones full of mock self-pity.

Count Hamnet reached out and set a consoling hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about it. Sometimes I don’t think you know what‘s going on, either.”

You have to understand what you’re fighting for. Otherwise, you were an animal—a brave animal, maybe, but an animal all the same.

After a case like that, writing about the work O’Doull had done during the war didn’t seem so bad. That, at least, had mattered. This? While he was sewing and splinting and cutting, he looked forward to this with a fierce and simple longing. Now that he had it again, he discovered the danger of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. It could prove as unfortunate in real life as in fairy tales.

Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.

The only way you could keep from getting old was by dying before you made it.

“Glad you’re back safe. I heard you were wounded—happy it wasn’t too serious.”

“Yeah.” The only wound that wasn’t serious was the one that happened to the other guy.

That wasn’t even remotely fair, but politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side’s guy out. Once you’d done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren’t worth a dime.