Harry Turtledove

“Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?”

“I hope there’s gray, Menefee said. “Black and white make things easier, but only if you don’t want to think.”

Patton stared at him. “Then why doesn’t he throw you in irons, the way you deserve?”

“Because he knows I think with my head, not with my heart or my balls,” Potter answered. “It’s really a useful technique. You ought to try it one of these days…sir.”

Hal Williamson shook his hand and said, “Good luck to you, buddy. Goddamn if I didn’t learn something from you.”

“What’s that?” Cincinnatus asked.

“Colored guys—you’re just like anybody else, only darker,” Hal answered.

Cincinnatus laughed. “Shit, I’ll that that. Good luck to you, too, man.”

The difference between what you counted on and what you got explained why so many people had unhappy marriages.

Only thing worse than fighting a war and winning is fighting a war and losing.

Cincinnatus Driver hadn’t been under fire for more than twenty-five years. He’d forgotten how much fun it wasn’t.

Had optimism run that far ahead of common sense?

Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.

Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.

Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there?

Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways.

Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble under foot. Everything has been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora’s feet, too.

“My God,” she said over and over. She wasn’t the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn’t a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?