Evan Tanner Quotes

If you cannot stand the spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.

coffee must be ‘hot as hell, black as sin, and sweet as love.

If you are lying, you have built your lie on true foundations.

you have a better chance to get pregnant if you keep your knees way up and stay that way as long as you can.

You don’t sleep. You’re thirty-four years old and lost the power to sleep when you were eighteen. Is

Your mother spreads herself for camels.

The Turks have dreary jails.

When the window turned dark, it was presumably night; when it grew blue again, I guessed that morning had come.

I don’t sleep, have not slept in sixteen years—

Your mother loves to perform fellatio upon syphilitic dogs.

Captain, so pleased to see that rumors of your death were exaggerated,” she told him, smiling. “Not so pleased as I am, Ambassador,” Eric said with a chuckle. “And I just had to explain that same turn of phrase to Admiral Tanner.

The fellow’s name was Lincoln W. Higgie–Bill to his friends–and he’d recently returned from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a precarious living smuggling rare coins and antiquities out of the country. (Precarious because it was illegal; if the authorities caught you they might sentence you to death, which was bad, or throw you into prison, which was demonstrably worse.) Bill Higgle was a numismatist–if you Google him, you’ll find he wrote a book on the coinage, tokens, and paper money of the Virgin Islands–and I was editing a numismatic magazine at the time. He showed up at the office, I

Rolfe MacGoohan of the Jacobite League reported sadly that he had made no headway with Prince Rupert of Bavaria, the Stuart pretender we hoped to restore to the English throne. A French anarchist named Claude Martinot sent

through the postage stamp republic of Andorra, and cleared French

Istanbul and find some way of getting to Balikesir. I would work my way through the city–the present population is 30,000–until I found the house Kitty’s grandmother had described to me. Her description was almost, but not quite, as good as a photograph. A very large house, three stories tall, on an elevation not far from the railroad station, and blessed with that extraordinary porch. There could not be too many houses of that description in Balikesir. If I found the house, I would have to investigate to see if the porch was still intact, then provide myself with an elementary metals detector and determine if there was anything inside. And, if the gold was there, then it would be simply a matter of digging it out and taking it away. A difficult matter, no doubt, but one that could be puzzled out later. It struck me as very likely that the gold was no longer there or had not been there in the first place. Still, one does not conclude that the grapes are sour without even attempting to see if the vine is within reach. Three million dollars–

While Rael Tanner seemed a rather sensible type, and the behemoth of a man in charge of the ground forces was also, the politicos were pretty much what one might expect from experience on Earth. They were a little different in motivation, perhaps, or at least in experience, but they still impeded the progress of pretty much anything they touched, like old hands.

My crime seemed destined to remain a secret forever.

When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.

that would have hidden the decades of filth that had left their stamp upon the wooden floor.

Breakfast was always a slab of cold black toast and a cup of thick black coffee. Lunch and dinner were always the same—a tin plate piled with a suspicious pilaff, mostly rice with occasional bits of lamb and shreds of vegetable matter of indeterminate origin.

Research is a joy, especially when one is not burdened with an excessive reverence for the truth.

defend, however, but access to the Forge. It was perhaps ironic, in a way, that the most desperate defense they had yet mounted against the Imperial forces would be in the defense of a world the Imperials had no idea even existed. Tanner laughed bitterly at that. Sometimes, reality had a way of turning out more bizarre than any half-cocked fantasy dreamed up by humanity. Fantasy had a tendency to follow man’s desire for the universe to make sense. Reality had no such compunctions.

Give a man a fish,' he said, 'and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and for the rest of his life you can sell him rods and reels and hooks and leaders and flies and lures and God only knows what else.