“Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view?”

“Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.”

“The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.”

“Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.”

“Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?""Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge”

“I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.”

“Yes," Vorkosigan agreed, "I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.”