Lois McMaster Bujold quotes:

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.

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

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

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?

Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

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

What you are is a question only you can answer.

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)

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've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.

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?

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

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

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

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.

Ethan thought he understood how a propaganda-stuffed young soldier must feel the first time in combat, stumbling by some sudden chance over his enemy's human face. He had gloried for a red moment in his power to break her. Now he stood foolishly with the pieces in his hands. Not at all heroic.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

My home is not a place, it is people.

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

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.

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

There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.

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.

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.

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

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

Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

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

Second sight is redundant to reason anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It wasn't a case of storming heaven. It was a case of letting heaven storm you.

But personally, I think [sainthood] is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one's god.

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

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.

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.

[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? 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.

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

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

All true wealth is biological.

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.

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

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

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

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

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.

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

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

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.

Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.

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.

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

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

Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.

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

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

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.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Honor is what you know about yourself.

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?

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

I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

If there's no game, isn't winning a pretty meaningless concept?

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

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

If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.

If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, choose learning. It works most of the time.

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

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.