The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

Aim high. You may still miss the target but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance

You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Achievement is devastating, or at least disorienting, and they don’t warn you in advance. It’s the sudden change of momentum and direction, I think.

You will,” said Vorkosigan wearily, “sit in that fortified palace that half the engineers are going to be tied up constructing, and party in it, and let your men do your dying for you, until you’ve bought your ground by the sheer weight of the corpses piled on it, because that’s the kind of soldiering your mentor has taught you. And then send bulletins home about your great victory. Maybe you can have the casualty lists declared top secret.” “Aral, careful,” warned Vorhalas, shocked.