Anyone who forces something on someone and then says he will be better for it—you will, I hope, understand me when I say this is difficult to appreci… - Harry Turtledove

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.

He was a pretty fair officer, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.
Of course, when you got right down to it, who was?

She hated the calendar, hated the mirror and what it showed her every morning. A handsome woman, that’s what you are. She would almost rather have been ugly. Then she wouldn’t have to remember the beauty she had been not so long ago.