Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.

If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

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?

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

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

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?

Honor is what you know about yourself.

One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.

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

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.

He's not too short. He's just... concentrated.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including or perhaps especially the failures.

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.

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.

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