Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

Our children change us... whether they live or not.

Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.

This is the most important thing I will ever say to you. The human mind is the ultimate testing device. You can take all the notes you want on the technical data, anything you forget you can look up again, but this must be engraved on your hearts in letters of fire. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity. Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool metal. That’s all.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one. The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

One foot in front of the other, wasn't that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.

Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

On the sixth day God saw He couldn't do it all, so He created ENGINEERS

Real destiny takes everything-the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure-and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can't give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. I've come back from the dead to speak the truth to you. Real destiny gives you a mountain of life, and puts you on top of it.

I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is the higher achievement.

I'm sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.

I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

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.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.

Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later.

One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

You have to be careful who you let define your good.

My home is not a place, it is people.

But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique -- 'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'

Your father calls you to his court. You need not pack. You go garbed in glorious raiment. He waits eagerly by his palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at the high table, by his side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved.

The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.

I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.

The world is made by the people who show up for the job.

Oh, was that liquor of yours a stimulant?" asked Elena. "I wondered why he didn't fall asleep." "Couldn't you tell?" chuckled Mayhew. "Not really." Miles twisted his head to take in Elena's upside-down worried face, and smile in weak reassurance. Sparkly black and purple whirlpools clouded his vision. Mayhew's laughter faded. "My God," he said hollowly, "you mean he's like that all the time?

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.