Harry Turtledove Quotes

When you thought of permanent oblivion, temporary oblivion was the only foxhole you had.

He gathered enthusiasm when he thought of the goal, and not the means by which he had accomplished it.

Bullets have no chivalry

"Holy Jesus God, it's the Gerps shootin' us up!" the manager shouted. He hadn't known whether to say Germans or Japs, and came out with both at once.

They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January’s dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen’s suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives — a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do — so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one — young, and free, and happy.

"Isaac Cockrell finched but quickly gathered himself. "My friends," he said yet again, and this time was able to go on from here: "My friends, we're here tonight to show we all want Nathan Bedford Forrest to be the next President of our Confederate States of America."

Forrest's Trees raised a cheer. So did a good many men and women in the crowd; the women, of course, could not vote, but they enjoyed a rousing political spectacle no less than their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons."

At my age, I find I must be careful of my sleep, for I need it more but have more trouble winning it.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" The artificial intelligence that ran the ship put no true inflection into its word, but Smith knew his polite query meant something more like: are you out of your ever-loving mind?

(a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?).

Jerry had trouble imagining himself in his thirties, much less his seventies. What would 2024 look like? The politics would have to be better than today’s. They couldn’t very well be any worse!

Quantity had a quality of its own.

Well, I might even get used to the idea that she had no tail.

"Lee was pleased at how well both sides held to their pledges of keeping soldiers out of the disputed states. That did not mean no one invaded Kentucky and Missouri, however. Every politician, Northern and Southern, who could stand on a stump and put one word after another, or ten thousand after another ten, flooded into the two states to tell their people just why they should choose the United States or the Confederacy.
Listening to a pro-Confederate orator thunder abuse at the North at a torchlight rally one night in Frankfort, Charles Marshall made a sour face and said, "Anyone can tell he spent the war safely far away from the firing lines. Had he ever faced the Yankees in battle, he would own far more respect for their man hood than he currently displays."
"How right you are," Lee replied, as appalled as his aide at the oratory: the speaker had just called the Northerners cold blooded, fat-faced, nigger-loving moneygrubbers. Lee went on, "I confess to a certain amount of embarrassment at representing the same nation as does this eloquent fellow." To emphasize his distaste, he turned half away from the shouting, gesticulating man up on the platform.
"I know what you mean, sir." But Marshall, as if drawn by some horrid fascination, kept watching the orator. Red light from the torches flickered off his spectacle lenses. "Even if he wins votes, he also sows hatred.

"Lee stepped over two bodies in gray and one in green, walked inside. The fellow whose head and torso he had seen from the street had fought from a window here. Bullets had chewed up the wall opposite that window; the picture that hung there was no longer recognizable. One of the bandsmen who guarded Lee looked around and said, "Take away the dead men and it ain't so very peculiar

He rounded corners one by one, each time by himself. He didn't think about bravery till long afterwards; at the time, the only thing in his mind was the luckless lieutenant's empty shoes. If he did touch off a torpedo, he'd never know what hit him. Oddly, that helped steady him. He'd seen too many worse ways of dying.