You don’t pay back your parents. You can’t. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It’s a sort of entailment. Or if you don’t have children...

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn’t even know it.

If there’s no game, isn’t winning a pretty meaningless concept?

Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time–these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light...

No, amusing me only, I wonder if they realize how they are used?””Not a bit. They think they are the emperors of creation.””Poor lambs.””That’s not how I’d describe them.””I was thinking of animal sacrifice.””Ah. That’s...

In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the...

Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you’ll be so close as to be living inside each other’s skins.

Miles added it to his life’s lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.

Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.

(T)he cadet was too young to believe in death after life.

Modern warfare wasn’t supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan’s first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered...

So the difference between a criminal and a hero is the order in which their vile crimes are committed. And justice comes with a sell-by date. In that case, you’d better hurry. You wouldn’t want...

Your father calls you to his court. You need not pack. You go garbed in glorious raiment. He waits eagerly by his palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at the high...

There’s something to that in both directions,” said Ekaterin mildly. “Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It’s so infuriating. It took me the...

Hunting hawks did not belong in cages, no matter how much a man coveted their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They were far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman’s breasts and cry–even if he is at a convenient height for it.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman’s hands. Or maybe she hadn’t been patient. Maybe she’d been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry,...

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play ‘dying in childbirth’,...

You would — you would take him into Your heaven, my lord?” asked Ingrey in astonishment and outrage. “He slew, not in defense of his own life, but in malice and madness. He tried to...

One foot in front of the other, wasn’t that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.

So what’s the test?””Ah, that’s the trick of it. It’s not a test. It’s real life.

His master plan to get them all out the door early met its first check of the day when he opened his closet door to discover that Zap the Cat, having penetrated the security of...

There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you. I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you.- Miles Vorkosigan

It wasn’t a case of storming heaven. It was a case of letting heaven storm you.

Change is possible.”Change is inevitable.

It’s just a thing. You deal with it.” “As in, one damn thing after another?””Yes, very like.

I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe.””‘Know thyself.'” “We try, sir.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

And this was your friend?” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.

Real destiny takes everything—the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure—and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can’t give halves. You have to give it all. I...

But personally, I think [sainthood] is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one’s god.

They stared at her curiously, and she caught snatches of conversation in two or three languages. It wasn’t hard to guess their content, and she smiled a bit primly. Youth, it appeared, was full of...

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.~Dag Redwing Hickory Bluefield

The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.

Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.

Apologizing to me again, thought Miles miserably. For me. He keeps telling me I’m all right—and then apologizing. Inconsistent, Father.He shuffled back and forth across the room again, and his pain burst into speech. He...

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

Take heart, sir,” Cazaril consoled him. “It is not your destiny today to win a royacy for your son. It is to win an empire for your grandson.

It’s a . . . transcendental act. Making life. . . . ‘By this act, I bring one death into the world.’ One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between....

I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.

It was suicide, wasn’t it?””In an involuntary sort of way,” said Vorob’yev. “These Cetagandan political suicides can get awfully messy, when the principal won’t cooperate.””Thirty-two stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they...

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice – if not whether, then how, they may endure.

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later.

Anyway, if the Cetagandans really wanted to assassinate you, they’d hardly do it here. They’d slip something subtle under your skin that wouldn’t go off for six months, and then would drop you mysteriously and...

But when he’s cut, I bleed.