Harry Turtledove Quotes

I’ll tell you, though, this whole business of war would be a hell of a lot more fun if you didn’t get shot.

Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who have been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.

Lieutenant Crowder reported that submersible as probably destroyed, and if you don’t think Lieutenant Crowder knows everything in the world, well, shit, just ask him.

She was only eight years old, and still confused the way things should have been with the way they were.

He sees the country going forward. He doesn’t see the suffering he’s creating to make it go in the direction he wants.

The bullet doesn’t care who shot it, only where it’s going.

Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.

A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.

When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with.

You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works.

The War Department has all sorts of opinions," he said, sneering as he had when Dowling announced the Roosevelt was there. "A few of them bear a discernible relation to the real world—but only a few, mind you.

“Major Potter isn’t a pal—not exactly, anyhow.” As far as he could see, the only thing he and the bespectacled major had in common was an unbounded contempt for the bluebloods who, because of who their grandfathers had been, got a higher rank and a bigger arena in which to display their blunders than they deserved.

The War Department had never forgiven Jake for being right.

Fashion made a harsh mistress.

Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.