Lois McMaster Bujold Quotations

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

I'm very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

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

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.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.

Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.

I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.

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.

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

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.

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

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.

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

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

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

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.

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.

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.

You try to give away what you want yourself.

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.

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

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.

But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?

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

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

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.

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.

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

Honor is what you know about yourself.

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

If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.

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.

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

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

My home is not a place, it is people.

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

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

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

The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.

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

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

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

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

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

And this was your friend?" Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.

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.

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste ears, 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

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.

It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

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

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

A price is something you get. A cost is something you lose.

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.

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

Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.

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

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

Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

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

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

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

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

I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.” - Jimi Hendrix, “The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't Panic." "I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining .

Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.

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.

You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.

I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.

You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.

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."

Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.

Read, or you will be missing something extraordinary.

The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.

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.

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

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor

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.

Second sight is redundant to reason anyway.

Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.

A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.

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.

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.

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

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.

[Koudelka] looked back, "You?! I know you! You trust beyond reason!" [Cordelia] met his eyes steadily, "Yes, it's how I get results beyond hope, as you may recall.

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.

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.

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.

Mia Maz glanced aside in concern at his muffled snort. "Are you all right?" "Yes. Sorry," he whispered. "I'm just having an attack of limericks." Her eyes widened, and she bit her lip; only her deepening dimple betrayed her. "Shhh," she said, with feeling.

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.

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