Miles Vorkosigan Quotes

Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't Panic."
"I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining . ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

This is important! But you have to stay absolutely cool. I may be completely off-base, and panicking prematurely."
"I don't think so. I think you're panicking post-maturely. In fact, if you were panicking any later it would be practically posthumously. I've been panicking for days. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

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. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

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 ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

He bit his fingernails. He bit his toenails. He pulled tiny green threads from his shirt and tried flossing his teeth. Then he tried making little green designs with tiny, tiny knots. Then he hit on the idea of weaving messages. Could he macramé "Help, I am a prisoner . . ." and plant it on the back of someone's jacket by static charge? If someone ever came back, that is? He got as far as a delicate gossamer H, E, L, caught the thread on a hangnail while rubbing his stubbled chin, and reduced his plea to an illegible green wad. He pulled another thread and started over. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Save me from the virtuous. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

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. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Vormurtos leaned on the frame with his arms crossed, and failed to move aside.

At Miles's polite, "Excuse us, please," Vormurtos pursed his lips in exaggerated irony.

"Why not? Everyone else has. It seems if you are Vorkosigan enough, you can even get away with murder."

Ekaterin stiffened unhappily. Miles hesitated a fractional moment, considering responses: explanation, outrage, protest? Argument in a hallway with a half-potted fool? No. I am Aral Vorkosigan's son, after all. Instead, he stared up unblinkingly, and breathed, "So if you truly believe that, why are you standing in my way?"

Vormurtos's inebriated sneer drained away, to be replaced by a belated wariness. With an effort at insouciance that he did not quite bring off, he unfolded himself, and opened his hand to wave the couple past. When Miles bared his teeth in an edged smile, he backed up an extra and involuntary step. Miles shifted Ekaterin to his other side and strode past without looking back.

Ekaterin glanced over her shoulder once, as they made their way down the corridor. In a tone of dispassionate observation, she murmured, "He's melted. You know, your sense of humor is going to get you into deep trouble someday."

"Belike," Miles sighed. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Galeni made her smile but not laugh. The lack of any sense of play between them worried Miles; you had to have a keen sense of humor to do sex and stay sane. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around. ~ Miles Davis

I feel most like myself ... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning. ~ Junot Diaz

If you look into the past of the successful painter you will find square miles of canvas behind him. ~ Charles Webster Hawthorne

If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity."
Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad. ~ Richard Russo

My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us ... step back from the shadow of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step. ~ John F. Kennedy

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic. ~ Miles Davis

Heed the spark or you may dread the fire ... ~ Miles Franklin

I heard Molly say, 'Our Mouse is a hundred miles away.' But I wasn't as far away as that; I was in a dimly lit street somewhere in Hampstead. ~ Dodie Smith

It is sad but true that many business people have no business being in business. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of miles out at sea to the southeast of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats at once hurried towards the alarm. The adventuresome occupants of the boat, a seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys, had actually seen the monsters passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating, five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep, rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the southeast. ~ H.G.Wells

We can make 'intelligent' missiles that can make war on one particular building hundreds of miles away, but we don't have an equivalent one that can make peace. Might that be because we have worshipped the gods of war, but have forgotten about worshipping the prince of peace? We can put a few men on the moon, but the few men who were standing between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 had to be withdrawn for lack of funds and political will. Might that be because we have worshipped the gods of technology, the gods who boost our own national security--the gods we have wanted, i other words--and have forgotten the God who asked Cain, 'Where is Abel your brother? ~ N.T. Wright

In the distant past, in what might be described as the Golden Days of War, the business of wreaking havoc on your neighbours (these being the only people you could logistically expect to wreak havoc upon) was uncomplicated. You - the King - pointed at the next-door country and said, "I want me one of those!" Your vassals - stalwart fellows selected for heft and musculature rather than brain - said, "Yes, my liege," or sometimes, "What's in it for me?" but broadly speaking they rode off and burned, pillaged, slaughtered and hacked until either you were richer by a few hundred square miles of forest and farmland, or you were rudely arrested by heathens from the other side who wanted a word in your shell-like ear about cross-border aggression. It was a personal thing, and there was little doubt about who was responsible for kicking it off, because that person was to be found in the nicest room of a big stone house wearing a very expensive hat. ~ Nick Harkaway

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington . . . climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles--and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. ~ Charles C. Mann

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth. ~ Graham Chapman

Darkness turned to noon. Even with the nose cone of the Learjet pointed away from the blast, the flash blinded everyone inside. Diaz lost control of the aircraft. It pitched over into a screaming, spinning dive, hurtling earthward at over five hundred miles per hour. In the cabin, people slammed into each other in the terror of flashblindness. General Steyn screamed in pain. Hauer half-fell past Burton into the cockpit. "Straighten up!" he screamed. ~ Greg Iles

Ted, damned if I'm not impressed with your candor! ~ Les Miles

You know that jerk that drives up the shoulder on the freeway, passing perhaps miles of cars stuck patiently in traffic, just knowing someone up there, eventually, will let him in?
It's the same thing!
Someone always accommodates the pushy, petulant jerk!
Someone always lets that guy with the silver Porsche Boxster in and the rest of us, stuck behind the guy letting him in, have to suffer.
It's the same with people all over.
It only takes one sucker. One push-over to mess it up for the rest of us. ~ Logan Ryan Smith

I must court her now,' said the Prince. 'Leave us alone for a minute.' He rode the white expertly down the hill.
Buttercup had never seen such a giant beast. Or such a rider.
'I am your Prince and you will marry me,' Humperdinck said.
Buttercup whispered, 'I am your servant and I refuse.'
'I am your Prince and you cannot refuse.'
'I am your loyal servant and I just did.'
'Refusal means death.'
'Kill me then.'
'I am your Prince and I'm not that bad - how could you rather be dead than married to me?'
'Because,' Buttercup said, 'marriage involves love, and that is not a pastime at which I excel. I tried once, and it went badly, and I am sworn never to love another.'
'Love?' said Prince Humperdinck. 'Who mentioned love? Not me, I can tell you. Look: there must always be a male heir to the throne of Florin. That's me. Once my father dies, there won't be an heir, just a king. That's me again. When that happens, I'll marry and have children until there is a son. So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son, or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind.'
'I'll never love you.'
'I wouldn't want it if I had it.'
'Then by all means let us marry. ~ William Goldman

The moon. There's no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow. ~ Lucia Berlin

Miles away, factory smokestacks rimmed with flame sent up cast billowing clouds of smoke that gave watercolor look to the sky – orange yellow – a pink cast like dawn – beauty to the gray-layered winter sky like cotton batting laced with flame bleak and radiant simultaneously; and Felix in a rush of gratitude though his heartbeat was still erratic and his hands were sticky with blood could have weepy seeing such beauty in all he'd been a witness to most of his life, thinking Oh Jesus he was going to miss these opaque surfaces of a world he knew so well, it was like his skill turned inside out, all he loved out there, he was missing them even now when he was still here, still alive. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

In stark contrast to two nights ago, when I felt Peeta was a million miles away, I'm struck by his immediacy now. As we settle in, he pulls my head down to use his arm as a pillow; the other rests protectively over me even when he goes to sleep. No one has held me like this in such a long time. Since my father died and I stopped trusting my mother, no one else's arms have made me feel this safe. ~ Suzanne Collins

If you asked Rahul Dravid to walk on glass for his team, his only question would be - 'How many miles?' That just shows you how great a man he is. ~ Harsha Bhogle

I was more'n forty by then," said Miles sadly. "I was married. I had two children. But, from the look of me, I was still twenty-two. My wife, she finally made up her mind I'd sold my soul to the Devil. She left me. She went away and she took the children with her."
"I'm glad I never got married," Jesse put in. ~ Natalie Babbitt

Slow down. Enjoy life. It's tough to slow down if your mind is going a million miles a second. It's tough to slow down if you think what these people do here matters. ~ Frederick Lenz

Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I'm stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I've got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that's before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn't been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder. ~ Charles Stross

Those who have known pain should have mercy on others. ~ Miles Cameron

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The delivery room is cold and it has a view of the city. A view of smokestacks and snow-kissed rooftops. An industrial grid of squares that seem to go on for miles. And the snowflakes have wings. Big white butterflies suspended in air. The kind kids like to catch on their tongues. ~ Daniel Abbott

her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know. ~ Carol Lee

Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, "from the faraway nearby." It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world. ~ Rebecca Solnit

One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles. ~ Dava Sobel

I once found a kernel of corn in the middle of a deep wood by Walden, tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high as my head, either by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile at least from any corn-field. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Thousands of miles,' I said. It's Rhosilli, USA. We're going to camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the winds. ~ Dylan Thomas

It was daylight and I drove everyone home - I was driving a Mini with John and Cynthia and Pattie in it. I seem to remember we were doing eighteen miles an hour and I was really concentrating - because some of the time I just felt normal and then, before I knew where I was, it was all crazy again. Anyway, we got home safe and sound, and somewhere down the line John and Cynthia got home. I went to bed and lay there for, like, three years. ~ George Harrison

I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her. ~ Miles Franklin

Did I piss you off somehow? Because I'm having some trouble figuring you out."
Crank shrugged and looked out the window again, then said, "I'm not an easy guy to figure out."
"I'm not interested enough to try. It's just that last night you were all, stay the hell away, and this morning you were friendly, and now I'm sitting in a car with an ice cube. I don't do moody."
"I didn't ask you to," he responded.
"Are you always such a dickhead?"
His eyes widened, and he looked over at me. Then he smirked and laughed out loud. We were still sitting at a red light, so I glared at him.
"You're actually really hot," he said. The smirk on his face widened a little.
"You're actually really an ass," I replied. ~ Charles Sheehan-Miles

It's hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther - beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say - quickly became almost foreign. It wasn't just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere. ~ Bill Bryson

I enjoy a four-seasonal climate and wide-open spaces, so being on an island 2,500 miles into the South Pacific made me feel a little claustrophobic. ~ Matthew Fox