Never,” said Kareen with passion, “ever suggest they don’t have to pay you. What they pay for, they’ll value. What they get for free, they’ll take fo… - Lois McMaster Bujold

Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot.

The trouble with synopsized information was that it was always so nebulous. The devil was in the details, the raw data; embedded therein were all the tiny clues that fed the intuition demon until it became strong and fat and, sometimes, grew up to become an actual Theory, or even a Proof.

“A quagmire of delay,” Lady Xarre observed, “has trapped efforts at righting wrongs before.”