Harry Turtledove Quotes

Has anyone ever told you, sir, that you may be too damn smart for your own good?" "A whole raft of people, Colonel Landis," Morrell answered cheerfully. "Once or twice, they've even been right.

And do you know of opossums? Have they come this far north?" "I have seen one or two." Sarus made a face. "Horrible things, like big rats with pointed faces.

"It is an evil, sir, an unmitigated evil," Lincoln said. "I shall never forget the group of chained Negroes I saw going down the river to be sold close to a quarter of a century ago. Never was there so much misery, all in one place. If your secession triumphs, the South will be a pariah among nations." "We shall be recognized as what we are, a nation among nations," Lee returned. "And, let me repeat, my being here is a sign secession has triumphed. What I would seek to do now, subject to the ratification of my superiors, is suggest terms to halt the war between the United States and Confederate States." Lincoln refused to call Lee's country by its proper name. As a small measure of revenge, Lee put extra weight on that name. Lincoln sighed. This was the moment he had tried to evade, but there was no evading it, not with the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia in his parlor. "Name your terms, General," he said in a voice full of ashes.

No one argued with him, which was a pleasant novelty.

[Dr.] Riario’s laugh was harsh. “I hate smallpox, and even more I hate being helpless against it. If it’s God’s curse as they say, why, I curse God back for it.”

What's obvious," Morrell observed, "isn't always true.

It's not the way it was any more," he said, half to himself. "Nothing is the way it was anymore.

Some people blame the devil to keep from owning up to their shortcomings.

Beauty didn’t last. Brains did.

“Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,” Abell said. “We discourage that.”
We? You have a tapeworm? Dowling wondered.

Proclaiming they had the answers was the easy part. Really having them, and making them work—that looked harder. That looked a hell of a lot harder to him. But some people would buy castles in the air because they were short of beans on the ground.

He knew what he imagined and what was real were not one and the same. Knowing it and coming to terms with it were not one and the same, either.

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

That was something else war was about: not caring.

Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.