Harry Turtledove Quotes

"...all the pools are going batshit like you wouldn't believe.... Batshit... It's a technical term... Fleidermausscheisse, okay?"
Fleidermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better — not good, but better — stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays.

You know what I mean. Is it true the folk hereabouts” — he pointed to the land ahead — “are cripples? Missing half their hindquarters?”
“The fauns? Cripples?” I laughed. “By the gods who made them, no!

"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.

An empty belly makes a stern taskmaster.~Victor Radcliff

when we awoke someone had stolen the sea.

People you don't like are pigheaded. Your friends are stubborn, or hold to their purpose.~Victor Radcliff

Possum soup, all nice and thick with peanuts,

He’d never played in Wrigley Field — the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid’s dolly with its head blown off. Muldoon’s eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. “Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant,” he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park — and the city.

"Isn't this grand? Here I am, a nobody from a nowhere town in North Carolina, and now I've seen Richmond and Washington City both. Who'd've figured I'd travel so far? Must be close to two hundred miles down to Rivington."

Caudell nodded. The army had expanded his life. Before the war, outside of a couple of trips to Raleigh, he'd spent his whole life inside Nash County. Now he'd been in several different states and even though recalling it still came hard sometimes-a for eign country: the United States.

Whether in a foreign country or not, Washington was still the source of traditions he held dear, as London once might have been to an early Carolina colonist. ...The ordinary folk of Washington City did better at taking their occupiers in stride. Their principal complaint against the rebels was that they had too little money, and that in Confederate currency. Lee had issued an order that made the locals take Southern money in exchange for goods and services, but he could not

Except when Yankees are around,” Moss said. “Then they’ll swear up and down that they didn’t know what was going on. Some prick will probably write a book that shows how they didn’t really massacre their Negroes after all.” “Oh, yeah? Then where’d the smokes go?” Goodman asked. “I mean, they were there before the war, and then they weren’t. So what happened?” “Well, we killed a bunch of ’em when we bombed Confederate cities.” Moss was a well-trained attorney; he could spin out an argument whether he believed in it or not. “Some died in the rebellion. Some went up to the USA. Some died of hunger and disease — there was a war on, you know. But a massacre? Nah. Never happened.” Barry Goodman’s mouth twisted. “That’s disgusting. That’d gag a maggot, damned if it wouldn’t.” “Bet your ass,” Moss said. “You think it won’t happen, though? Give it twenty years — thirty at the outside.” “Disgusting,

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!

The United States are here, as are we; our two nations have a common border which stretches for two thousand miles, more or less. Either we learn not to be distracted by our differences or we fight a war every generation, as the nations of Europe are in the habit of doing. I would not care to see such folly come to our shores.

For some idiot reason, the idea of going into the drink with a misspelled safety device weirded Bryce out.

"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?

and the jerks back home sure aren’t helping.