Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15) QUOTES

2 " 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 by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

4 " The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

6 " Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

8 " Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

10 " Tej nodded again. “Then he turned up on my front steps. I thought he might be a capper stalking me. So I invited him in, and Rish shot him.” The cousin jerked slightly. The emperor’s eyebrows went up. “Stunned him, sweetling,” Rish corrected, urgently. “Just a little light stun, really.” “And then we dragged him up to our flat,” Tej went on. “This wasn’t in the ImpSec report,” said The Gregor. “It wasn’t relevant by then,” said Ivan Xav, in a distant tone. “Forgive, forget . . .” “So we tied him to a chair for the night,” said Tej. The Lord Auditor Coz made a strange little wheeing sound. He was biting his own hand, Tej noticed. Ivan Xav pointedly ignored him. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

12 " It was Ivan’s morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

14 " Is your claustrophobia better now?” Delia asked Ivan Xav, more in a tone of curiosity than concern. Ivan Xav gritted his teeth. “I do not have claustrophobia. Thank you very much, Delia. There’s nothing irrational about it. . . . About me.” “But Miles said—” “I have an allergy to total strangers trying to kill me, is all. One that Miles shares, I might point out.” Delia’s lips twisted. “I don’t know, Ivan. I think Miles actually gets rather excited by that.” “You may be right,” agreed Galeni. “Do you suppose it’s the attention?” said Delia. “He does like to be at the center.” Ivan Xav choked into his own napkin at this one, and was drawn away from his little moment of irate by uniting with this old friend in trading scurrilous observations about The Coz, none of which, Tej noticed, Galeni tried to gainsay. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

16 " It seemed to Ivan that he needed to court his wife. Promptly. In the next, what was it, ten days. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

18 " Ivan had never thought of his nightmares as being insufficiently imaginative, before tonight. Dark, wet, constricted, underground, check. How had he left out biohazards? After all that, the frigging unexploded bomb just seemed a . . . a redundant redundancy. And the stray corpse a mere decoration. How did I get into this mess? Miles isn’t even here. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)

20 " Not that people did much sailing on Ylla’s extensive oceans, nor swimming either—Yllan seawater tended to give humans strange rashes, and while humans were highly toxic morsels in the diet of the native sea monsters, the monsters were extremely stupid and kept not figuring this out. "

― Lois McMaster Bujold , Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15)