"You’d know that if you’d studied something useful like engineering instead of, what is it this year, Down With Dead White Males, or whatever they call your artsy-fartsy curriculum."
Margaret Ball (1515–1584) was a prominent member of 16th-century Irish society, who, despite being the widow of a Lord Mayor of Dublin, was arrested for her adherence to the Catholic faith and died of deprivation in the dungeons of Dublin Castle. She was declared a martyr for the faith by the Catholic Church and beatified in 1992, one of a group of 17 Irish Catholic Martyrs.
"It was one long scene of unrelieved misery; not the sort of thing a man of his position should ever be subjected to. One knew that these things happened in war, of course; they were regrettable but necessary. But one preferred not to experience them at first hand."
"Well, that was interesting. The question she really wanted to ask was, How come you people take all this so seriously? But that wasn’t in the book."
"“You tried to warn me about Aigar. All of you did. And I didn’t want to believe you.” “Loyalty is no crime,” Domerc said gently. “Totally idiotic, unreasoning loyalty is. Or ought to be,” Allie said."
"At least some of the techniques she’d learned at Valley View still worked. If you talked nonsense long enough and looked like being a major interruption to the day’s work, they would send you on to somebody else. And when they ran out of somebody elses to send you to, the last one would sign whatever it was needed signing just to get you to go away."
"For once his years of teaching experience stood him in good stead; he was an old hand at sounding knowledgeable while dodging surprise questions from smart-breeched scholars."
"I don’t know how they find things out so quickly, but haven’t you ever noticed how mercenary troops show up about three minutes after somebody’s decided to increase the war budget?"