Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

It’s important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

I'd storm heaven for you, if I knew where it was.

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.

The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

I'm not getting it all sorted, she worried. I'm not getting it right. You are brilliant, the Voice reassured her. It is imperfect. So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.

I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.

Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

Hi, I'm a hero, but I can't tell you why. It's classified.

Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself.

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, a scientist, an artist, or an entrepreneur. In service of their goals, they lay down time, energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.

Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.

When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, "He didn't hit me."

For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.

All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters.

Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

Wikipedia is so dangerous. You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in [Japanese] anime.

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard

Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.

"It was suicide, wasn't it?" "In an involuntary sort of way," said Vorob'yev. "These Cetagandan political suicides can get awfully messy, when the principal won't cooperate." "Thirty-two stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they ever saw?" murmured Ivan, clearly fascinated by the gossip. "Exactly, my lord."

I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe." "'Know thyself.'" "We try, sir.

Any communitys arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.

Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.

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

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

You try to give away what you want yourself.

The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.