“Baron Vladimir Harkonnen had made a lifetime career of seeking new experiences. He dabbled in hedonistic pleasures - rich foods, exotic drugs, deviant sex - discovering things he had never done before.But a baby in Harkonnen Keep...how would he handle that?”

“Sometimes I wonder about Piter," the Baron said. "I cause pain out of necessity, but he...I swear he takes a positive delight in it."-Baron Vladimir”

“If I decide to make a career in the army, he said, I would never be rich, but I would live one of the most satisfying lives there was to be had. Thenhe warned me that satisfaction would come at a great cost to me and any family I might have. I should never expected to be thanked; a soldier, if he was going to be content, had to understand that no civilian, no government,sometimes not even the army itself, would recognize the true nature of the scarifies he made.”

“He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.”

“They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport. With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try.”

“She was ashamed. She would not--she would not--be frightened of him: he was what he was, and he had made a promise he would keep.”