Harry Turtledove

He’d turned fifty-seven earlier in the year, and the past had a way of looking better and the present worse the older he got.

We must deal with life as it is, not with life as we wish it were or as it may be ten years or fifty years from now.

“So this is the famous George Cannon of whom you telegraphed me, is it? He doesn’t look so much like a wild-eyed fanatic as some of the ones we snared before.”

“No, sir,” Custer agreed: close enough for his superiors to hear him, he made a point of agreeing with them. “But without their coldhearted, coolheaded comrades egging them on, the wild-eyed fanatics could not do so much damage.”

“Why do we have such a pack of confounded dunderheads running this country?”

“My theory used to be that we get the government we deserve,” Sam said. “Bad as we are, though, I don’t think we’re that bad. Right now, I’m taking a long look at the notion that God hates us.”

Courage and the goodness of one’s cause, unfortunately, do not always go hand in hand.

“Won’t it be fine, getting to spend Christmas somewhere near the edge of civilization?”

“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp agreed enthusiastically. “If El Paso isn’t civilization, at least it’s on the railroad line to it.”

Like South Carolina, Utah is too large to be an insane asylum and too small to make a nation, and, unlike South Carolina, lacks other nearby states full of zanies to join her in her madness.

Impasse. Stuart hated impasses. He hated ambiguity of any kind. The older he got, the more ambiguity he saw in the world. He hated that, too.

An army that was winning had little backbiting. When things went wrong, everyone was at pains to prove the misfortune could not possibly have been his fault.

“Oh, they are great ones for taking a high moral tone, the Confederate States,” Douglass said. “Taking a high moral tone costs them nothing. Living up to it is something else again.”

War was rapidly doing what war did—making ugly everything it touched.

Custer paused and sent Tom a quizzical look. “‘Scoops’? What’s a scoop?”

“A Mormon. Heard it the other day,” his brother answered. After removing his hat, Tom mimed removing the top of his skull in the same way and scooping out a large portion of its contents. “Have to have most of your brain missing to buy what they’re selling, don’t you think?”

“Mm, you’re likely right.”