Lois Mcmaster Bujold Quotes

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

[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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Think of the glory. Think of your reputation. Think how great it'll look on your next resume.On my cenotaph, you mean. Nobody will be able to collect enough of my scattered atoms to bury. You going to cover my funeral expenses, son?Splendidly. Banners, dancing girls, and enough beer to float your coffin to Valhalla.- Miles coaxing Ky Tung to agree to an almost suicidal mission

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods.Do you?I believe they are not here, yes. It's a faith of sorts.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease—that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

I'm afraid even ImpSec has no explanation for women's tastes in men.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

(Watching her) was a little like watching water lilies; rather more like smelling a dinner he was not allowed to eat. Was it possible to be starved for so long as to forget the taste of food, for the pangs of hunger to burn out like ash? It seemed so. But both the pleasure and the pain were his heart’s secret, here. He was put in mind, suddenly, of the soil at the edge of a recovering blight; the weedy bedraggled look of it, unlovely yet hopeful. Blight was a numb gray thing, without sensation. Did the return of green life hurt? Odd thought.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Galeni made her smile but not laugh. The lack of any sense of play between them worried Miles, you had to have a keen sense of humor to do sex and stay sane.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Don't let fear swallow all your happiness. Don't forget to take joy. Dag gulped. Both of their grounds were nearly closed. It was Arkady's voice alone that hinted how hard-bought this bit of wisdom might've been, yet the words had been nearly toneless.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don't make children--children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time--these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

You? I know you! You trust beyond reason.She met his eyes steadily. Yes. It's how I get results beyond hope. As you may recall.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you. I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you.- Miles Vorkosigan

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

You were kind.”Cazaril shrugged. “Why not? What could it cost me, after all?”Bergon shook his head. “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 his ease before his own hear

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

It’s true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight.That’s not insight. That’s a personal guarantee.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman's breasts and cry—even if he is at a convenient height for it.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there....

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

You want to be good. All right, I can understand that. But you have to be careful who you let define your good.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold