Harry Turtledove Quotes

When you were fifteen, you knew everything always turned out fine in the end. Arthur McGregor was a good deal past twice fifteen. He knew how foolish you were at that age.

The lad was at an age where he was inclined to believe things would turn out as he wanted for no better reason than that he wanted them to turn out so.

How am I supposed to surprise you, Lucius?" He spread his hands and shrugged. "As long as we've been married, and you still expect to surprise me? You make me happy. That is enough, and more than enough. What do I need of surprises?

When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.

Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he’d learned too well, weren’t fussy about whom they hit.

The paper was shipped up from the USA, and full of lies; since the demise of the Rosenfeld Register (which had been only half full of lies), no local paper had been permitted. But even lies could be interesting if they were new lies: why else did people read so many books and magazines?

The Book of Mormon is no more the word of God than is an advertising circular for stomach powders.

Shouldering the bag, Moss made for the canvas tents that housed his new squadron. Such arrangements were all very well now, with the weather warm, but could you live in a tent in the middle of winter? Maybe the war would be over and he wouldn’t have to find out. He clicked tongue between teeth. He believed nonsense like that the year before. He was a tougher sell now.

Know what you’re doing and you’ll never need to cheat.

How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don't get to call them names whenever we please? That's not fair." "Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country," he told her. "If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what's fair.

Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, “What—is it like at the front?” Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.
Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, “Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like.”
Nobody asked him any more questions.

Scott said, “If things had gone the way they were supposed to, we’d have been in Philadelphia a long time ago.”
“Yeah, and if pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Featherstone replied with a snort “When you’ve been through even a little more fighting, kid, you’re going to see that things just don’t go the way they’re supposed to.”

Being sure wasn’t the same thing as being right.

War would have been a much simpler, easier business with politics out of the mix.