Honorverse favorite one-liners

Hutch wrote:

KNick wrote:
This is another one from "From the Highlands"

Indeed, and I posted nearly a whole page of lines from that story here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5123

If you haven't read it yet, cthia, you owe it to yourself to do so.

. "Oh, how my trust in all three of you has been betrayed! Woe and lamentations. And so forth."

BrightSoul wrote:For the Hanky brigade:

House of Steel wrote:
Elizabeth descended the final three steps to the polished marble floor. Father O’Banion waited silently at the head of those steps, by the antique-looking grill whose door he had unlocked to allow her entrance. The bars of that grill looked like wrought iron, but they were actually battle steel, not that it mattered. Not now, at this moment.
She crossed the private family crypt silently, Ariel very still on her shoulder, and stopped before the carved marble plaque. It was very simple, that plaque, compared to the far more ornate one set into the cathedral floor above it:

Roger Michael Danton Maxwell Winton
August 19, 1809–October 7, 1883 PD
Beloved husband and father, who reigned too briefly
in this city and reigns forever in our hearts.
“I will build my house of steel.”

Elizabeth stood before that plaque, looking at it, thinking about the seventy T-years between her father’s first letter to the Proceedings and this moment. Thinking about her uncle, who hadn’t lived to see this day yet had known it was coming. Thinking about all the sacrifices, all the pain, all the destruction and lost lives and shattered hearts. Thinking about how many had given so much to bring her here, to this place, on this still, quiet night.
Feeling the tears break loose.
They fell into the silence like lost, broken bits of crystal, those tears, kissing that marble floor. And then, finally, she reached out and touched the words. Let her fingertips run gently, tenderly across them, and leaned forward, resting her forehead against the cool, unyielding stone while Ariel crooned lovingly in her ear.
“We got them, Dad,” she whispered into the stillness. “We got them.”

Good communications discipline, the major thought wryly. Maybe we should try boarding surrendered Solly superdreadnoughts more often as a training technique.

"I never realized just how much worse a victory could make a defeat taste”

Kizarvexis wrote:Here is one of my favorites from Ashes of Victory.

backstory
"I think your Graysons think I'm a bad influence on you, dear," Allison remarked as she and Honor walked down the third-floor hall of Honor's new mansion on their way to the ground-floor dining room. They turned a corner, and Allison paused at a sitting room's open door to properly admire the huge swath of ankle-deep carpet that stretched luxuriously from the door to an entire wall of one-way crystoplast and a breathtaking view of Jason Bay. It was the fourth such door she'd paused at, and each sumptuously furnished room had boasted its own, unique color combination and decorating style.


Alison's line
"Not too shabby," she approved in a deliberately blasé tone. "Still," she went on just a bit critically, "if I were you, I think I'd have the bay dyed a deeper blue."