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Harry Turtledove

400 quotes

“Something wrong, sir?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked. “No good deed goes unpunished,” Morrell answered.”
Harry Turtledove (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What’s Guinness?” Hirskowitz asked Carsten. “It’s what they make in Ireland instead of beer,” Sam said helpfully. “It’s black as fuel oil, and almost as thick. It tastes kind of burnt till you get used to it. After that, it’s not so bad.” “Oh.” Hirskowitz weighed that. “Well, I’ll see. They make real beer, too?”
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“He spent years alternately chasing her and trying—always without much luck—to get her out of his mind. Now that he’d finally got her, finally found out just how much woman she was, losing her was the last thing he wanted. But two had to say yes. One was plenty for no.”
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“Soldiers don’t make policy. We only carry it out, and get blamed when it goes wrong.”
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“Yes, I know I haven’t told you anything. No offense, Sis, but you like running people’s lives so much, you don’t like it when they try and run their own.”
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“When he came up for air, he gasped, “You never kissed me like that before.” “Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either,” Rita answered. He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, “What else don’t I know?” “You’ll find out,” she said. “After the wedding.”
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“She knew the sea too well ever to trust it.”
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“God bless you, suh, for what you done there.” “I don’t believe in God, anymore than I believe in Mother Goose,” Darrow said. “Foolish notion. But I do believe in justice, and you deserve that. Everyone deserves that.”
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“They eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension.”
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“Flora wasn’t sure she liked that in the abstract; whom a man knew shouldn’t have mattered so much as what he knew. But that didn’t change reality one bit.”
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“The Confederate States had been founded on the principle that change was a bad idea.”
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“In a way, misery loves company. In another way, if everyone’s in trouble, nobody can help anybody else get out of it.”
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“God done made this happen. He kin make us come through it, too, so long as He take it in His mind He want to do dat.” “Amen,” Athenaeus said. Scipio made himself nod. He didn’t want to seem out of place—seeming out of place was one of his greatest fears, because it was deadly dangerous. But if God had really wanted to do something about this disaster, couldn’t He have stopped it in the first place?”
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“Some people had a vested interest in trouble. If it looked as if calm threatened to break out, people like that would do anything they could to thwart it.”
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“That’s logical. That’s a rational,” Hosea Blackford said. “Politics, unfortunately, is neither.”
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“A war is a disaster whether you win or you lose—it’s only a worse disaster if you lose.”
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“Of all the sins in this world, which is more unforgivable than the sin of not having enough money? None I can think of.”
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“Your trouble, Major, is that you think people spell prosecute and convict the same way,” Moss said. “That’s not how it works. Even in military court, the defendant’s entitled to a fair shake.”
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“That wasn’t even close to fair, and Sylvia knew it. But she’s already seen that political campaigns weren’t designed to be fair. They were designed to convince, by whatever means possible.”
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“The only happy people she saw coming out of the place were a young couple, the man carrying a crying baby. Maternity wards are different, Nellie thought as she went past them. I bet they’re the only place in a hospital where people win instead of losing.”
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“Beauty didn’t last. Brains did.”
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“Some people, though—some people think yelling something loud enough makes it so.”
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“Early summer in Nashville made a good practice ground for hell.”
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“Sir, don’t you think Utah is a special case?” “Every case has partisans who insist it is special,” Hoover answered. “I recognize none of them. I believe none of them. The same principles must apply throughout the United States.”
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“He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, ‘I am going to tell you the truth’—well, what else can he be except a liar?”
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“Manicheism, n., The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.”
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“But, as often happened, the official and the real had only a nodding acquaintance with each other.”
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“Like a lot of jailers, he was convinced the police who hunted down criminals couldn’t find a skunk if it was spraying their leg.”
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“Maybe not thinking about the price of failure was what marked a hero. On the other hand, maybe it just marked a damn fool.”
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“You kill everybody who doesn’t want to see reason, people will get mighty thin on the ground mighty fast.”
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“Hoover is one of the best men we’ve ever had for getting things done,” David said, “and one of the worst for figuring out what to do.”
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“They can’t say anything against the government, not in public they can’t.” “Is it a country or a jail?” Carsten asked. “Near as I can tell, sir,” the second yeoman said, “it’s a jail.”
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“The party and the CSA could get by without a lot of fellows who brought only fanaticism. Losing somebody with brains would have hurt much more. Brains were harder to come by.”
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“Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,” Abell said. “We discourage that.” We? You have a tapeworm? Dowling wondered.”
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“You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn’t cost you anything.”
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“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.”
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“You see?” he said. “You just wanted me to tell you I was wrong.” “Well, of course,” Anne answered, and poked him in the ribs. “What else does a woman want to hear from a man?” “How about, ‘I love you’? How about, ‘You’re beautiful’?” Potter suggested. “Those are nice, too,” she agreed with a smile. “As far as I’m concerned, though, nothing’s better than, ‘You were right.’”
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“Death is never dignified.” O’Doull spoke with a doctor’s certainty. “Never. Dignity in death is something we invent afterwards to make the living feel better.”
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“Peacetime, though, felt like summertime. Even as you enjoyed it, you knew it wouldn’t last.”
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“He’d escaped the last dragnet as much by luck as by anything else. You could tell a man not to be stupid, and maybe—if he wasn’t stupid to begin with—he’d listen. But how the devil could you tell a man not to be unlucky?”
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“Everyone marched everywhere at Fort Custer. Armstrong had begun to think Thou shalt march' was in the Bible somewhere right below Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain—two commandments he was learning more about violating every day.”
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“Only two promotions really mattered: the one up from buck private and the one to general’s rank.”
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“As happened too often in politics, never turned out not to be so very long after all.”
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“His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace.”
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“Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer.”
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“Sometimes a fellow who’d learned what to do with a rifle in his hands didn't care in which direction he pointed it.”
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“But then, how much of war was finding out the hard way what the other fellow had that you didn't know about ahead of time? Put that way, it sounded quietly philosophical. Put another way, it meant Sam was likely to get killed because some dimbulb in Philadelphia was asleep at the switch.”
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“You're lucky as hell, kid,” Moss said, glad to have something to talk about besides the pounding of his heart. “That's only a scratch, and you'll get yourself a Purple Heart on account of it.” “If I'd been lucky, they would have missed me,” the lieutenant said, which held more than a little truth. If he'd been unluckier, though, all the infinite cleverness and articulation of that hand would have been smashed to bloody, bony ruin in less than the blink of an eye.”
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“If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.”
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“Chester almost said so—almost, but not quite. He and Rita had been married a while now. He’d learned a wise man didn't antagonize his wife over something inherently unprovable, especially when she’d just given him breakfast.”
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