"His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some…"

"Talent’s cheap…historically, one of the cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you ca…"

"What Nancy Peabody can be blamed for was actually behaving like a crowbar, designed to pry open the locked places bel…"

"All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting the…"

"In short, they were like the complacent everywhere: in that they were already dead, and did not yet happen to know it…"

"There was never any shortage of Despair; it had always been far more common than hope, and there was always more bein…"

"Like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of th…"

"Every once in a while, some poor bastard get saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career an…"

"It was the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so they can imagine themselves clever withou…"

"She’s a little bit below mediocre, isn’t she? And the worst kind of below-par personality at that: the kind who belie…"