Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Yeah, so I'm short. But wait'll you see me dance.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Aren't family squabbles jolly fun? Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Peace to you, small lady. You've won a twisted poor modern knight, to wear your favor on his sleeve. But it's a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation. But at least I won't just tilt at windmills for you. I'll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers and blow them into the sky.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

We don't just march on the future, we charge it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a godlike being, not a, a... future subordinate. New ensigns were supposed to be a subhuman species anyway.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

If we shouldn't do it, we shouldn't be able to do it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Those who do not know their history are doomed to keep stepping in it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Your "accidents," I once noticed, have ways of entangling your enemies that are the green envy of mature and careful strategists. Far too consistent for chance, I concluded it had to be unconscious will.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I may be small, but I screw up big because I'm standing on the shoulders of GIANTS.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Rule 1: Only overrule the tactical computer if you know something it doesn't. Rule 2: The tac comp always knows more than you do.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The cream pie of justice flies one way.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Miles cursed himself silently, then out loud. He really had to try to cultivate a more normal attitude toward senior officers.... When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a god-like being, not a, a... future subordinate.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Am I reading too much into all that innuendo, or did you in fact just connive to assassinate Gregor in one breath, offer to cuckold him in the next, accuse your father of homosexuality, suggest a patricidal plot against him, and league yourself with Cavilo -- what are you going to do for an encore?" "Depends on the straight lines.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Hands are integral with brains, almost another lobe for intelligence. What one does not know through one's hands, one does not truly know.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Vorreedi stated dangerously, "I am not a mushroom, Lieutenant Vorkosigan." To be kept in the dark and fed on horseshit, right. Miles sighed inwardly.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

In my experience, milady, we can never get back to exactly where we started, no matter how hard we try.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You can't give power away and keep it simultaneously. Except posthumously.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Behavior that is rewarded is repeated. And the reverse.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The best strategies run on rails. Live or die, you make your goal.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Egalitarians adjust to aristocracies just fine, as long as they get to be the aristocrats.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Do you know what this is, Lord Vorkosigan?" Giaja asked. Miles eyed the medallion of the Order of Merit on its colored ribbon, glittering on a bed of velvet. "Yes, sir. It is a lead weight, suitable for sinking small enemies. Are you going to sew me into a silk sack with it, before you throw me overboard?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I thought they'd never fall asleep." Ivan paused; a slow smirk displaced the snarl on his face. "But they were smiling, when they finally did.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Luck is something you make for yourself, if you want it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Why did so many antique myths agree that hell was a circular place?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

All right," Miles pulled Suegar to his feet, "let's go preach to the unconverted." Suegar laughed suddenly. "I had a top kick once who used to say, 'Let's go kick some ass,' in just that tone of voice.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Now there's this about cynicism, Sergeant. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Let he who is without sin cast the first lure.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I can't quit, once I've started. I've been told I'm pathologically persistent. I can't quit.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Biology is Destiny.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The wounded want power, nothing else; they think it will keep them from being hurt again.

— 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

Men may move mountains, but ideas move men.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

There is a subtle difference between being a prisoner and being a slave. I don't mistake either for being free.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

When you can see the colors of the feathers, you'll also understand how you can expand your borders to infinity.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It's not a comfortable thing, to be chosen so. I tried to avoid it for a long time, but God finds ways of dealing with draft dodgers.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You're so hopelessly monosexual, Miles.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Mine is not a theology of the elect. I intend to preach to the masses. Even the sinners.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Is this guy for real?" "He thinks he's faking it, but he's not.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

There are a number of people in the universe I'd be willing to double-cross, but my own wounded aren't among 'em.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Total strangers trying to kill me make me feel right at home.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It just happens to be very important to me to win with the hand I was dealt.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Three cheers for literacy... I feel sick.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I'm just dazzled by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You are what you do.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The man who assumes everything is a lie is at least as mistaken as the one who assumes everything is true.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

No, no, never send interim reports. Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must either then obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

And what goes on in the head of a walking dead man? What personal failure could he possibly fear more than death itself?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You must kill if you expect to survive." "No you don't," Miles put in. "Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

When you can't get what you want, you take what you can get.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Don't panic." "I'm not panicking, I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I'm *not* schizophrenic. A little manic-depressive, maybe." "We try, sir.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Mother Nature gives a sense of romance to young people, in place of prudence, to advance the species. It's a trick—that makes us grow.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Damn the boy for making a fucking farce out of his own funeral!

— 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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Mark's own taste in women, if ever he should live to exercise it, ran more to something like that little blonde clone...Somebody short, soft, pink, timid, somebody who wouldn't kill and eat him after they mated.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

All true wealth is biological.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Confusion to the enemy.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I don't know. 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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Sometimes insanity is not a tragedy. Sometimes, it's a strategy for survival. Sometimes ... it's a triumph.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

His mother had often said, "When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action." She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

His heart still seemed to ache, the way an overstrained muscle twinged when one put weight on it. Like muscle strain, it would pass with a little rest, he suspected.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You try to give away what you want yourself.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Most men", he quoted, "are of naught more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into shit." "Leonardo da Vinci," Miles returned primly. But was compelled to add, "Grandfather quoted it to me, though.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Some fellows you have to hit with a brick to get their attention. Some you have to hit with a BIG brick.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on." "It's an inevitability. No trick. No choice. You just go on.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Strange mercies, Illyan. You kill me so courteously.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The last thing a monster wanted was a fellow to follow him around all day long with a mirror.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I was never a mercenary, not ever. Not for one single minute.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Cynicism did not seem nearly so impressively daring to her now as it had when she was twenty.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

If suspicion was the deadliest possible insult, then trust was always right, even if it was mistaken.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Marriage was a lottery, and you drew your lot in late adolescence or early adulthood at a point of maximum idiocy and confusion.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It was seldom he found himself in company who made him feel this stupid. It was probably good for his soul.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Eloquence consists of persuading people of things they desperately want to believe. Demagoguery, I suppose, is eloquence sliding to some least moral energy level.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

When I was twenty, I chose my life. It wasn't this one.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— 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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Marta blinked at him with manufactured innocence. "Kareen had it from Mark. I had it from Ivan. Mama had it from Gregor. And Da had it from Pym. If you're trying to keep it a secret, Miles, why are you going around telling everyone"?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Was this the trick of it? Secrets so dire as to be unspeakable, thoughts so frightening as to make clear young voices mute, kicked out into the open with blunt ironic humor. And suddenly the dire didn't loom so darkly any more, and fear shrank, and anyone could say anything. And the unbearable seemed a little easier to lift.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It is always easier to get forgiveness than permission.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

So much for that line of reasoning, Lord Richars," Ekaterin finished. She sat back with a hand-dusting gesture, and added, by no means under her breath, "Twit'.'

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Government by thugs in the Bloody Centuries gave Barrayar many colorful historical incidents, suitable for high drama. I don't think it's a drama we wish to return to in real life.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

For her, this was a metaphor, he reminded himself. Though maybe he was a metaphor too, inside his head with the Black Gang. A metaphor gone metastatic.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into just two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Adulthood isn’t an award they’ll give you for being a good child. You can waste … years, trying to get someone to give that sort of respect to you, as though it were some 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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I’d have worn them as a courtesy to your friend, I’ll wear them now as a defiance to our enemies.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Taura nailed it. She'll do for m'lord, all right. And God help their enemies.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

She's just as bad as he is! God help me.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

S funny. Piotr, toward the end of his life, looked at our district and only saw how much better it was. All the backbreaking, heartbreaking work he did cleaning up the messes after the war is taken for granted now, or mostly just forgotten. Instead, we look around and only see how much better it could be. And neither of us is wrong, exactly.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Old age," she said, "is slower than a grenade, but a lot more thorough.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The most interesting question of history is always, What were these people thinking?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Parallels, spirals, and reflections are some of my favorite literary patterns.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and others don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to — that I wrote for myself — seem to do the best of all.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Right or wrong, what I also saw was that you made an enemy, and left him alive behind you. Great charity. Bad tactics.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The joys of command — well, you know. You taught them to me. One part glory to ten parts shoveling manure.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I think it (i. e., sainthood) is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one's god.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

He found oddly little regret in his heart for his own lost life. He'd seen more of the world than most men ever did, and he'd had his chances, though the gods knew he'd made little enough of them. Marshaling his thoughts, as he sheltered under his covers, he realized with some wonder that his greatest dismay was for the work he'd be forced to leave undone.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The confusion of mind you dub honor is a disease.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I for one find a casual destruction of a man's life even more repugnant than a determined one.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Second sight is redundant to reason anyway.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Just what kind of noose are you offering to put round my neck, here? Is this treason?" "Worse," Cazaril sighed. "Theology.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

And you could just watch men begin to see what he told them they were seeing, whether it was there or not.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Stand before his grave and use your gift of breath to complain of your limited time. If you dare.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

"Mercy from the Father and the Mother, mercy from the Sister and the Brother, Mercy from the Bastard, five times mercy, High Ones, we beseech you."… Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The shocked silence that followed was decidedly baffled. And even, possibly, a little thoughtful, if that was not too much to hope.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.

— 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. In darkness, understanding.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The gods...the gods may forgive much, to a truly penitent heart." Her smile grew bitter as desert brine. "The gods may forgive Ista all day long. But if Ista does not forgive Ista, the gods may go hang themselves."

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You must go home eventually." "I would throw myself off a precipice first, except that I would land in the arms of the gods, Whom I do not wish to see again.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The entire center of her life was a blackened waste, its long years not to be recovered nor replaced.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I have denied my eyes, both inner and outer. I am not a child, or virgin, or modest wife, fearing to offend. No one owns my eyes now but me. If I have not the stomach by now to look upon any sight in the world, good or evil, beautiful or vile, when shall I? It is far too late for innocence. My only hope is the much more painful consolation of wisdom. Which can grow out of knowledge alone. Give me my true eyes. I want to see. I have to know.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I would be considerably more impressed with your god, dy Cabon," said Ista through her teeth, "if He could have arranged one life's worth of simple protection in advance, rather than three hundred lives' worth of gaudy vengeance afterward.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Such a perilous concentration of demons would create chaos all around it." "War gathers on these borders," said Ista. "A greater concentration of chaos I can hardly imagine.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

He gave me no sign. I was never the sort to receive portents, or to delude myself that I had. Silence was always my portion, in return for my prayers.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The gods would take him and leave me bereft, and I curse them!" "I have cursed them for years," said Ista dryly. "Turnabout being fair.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

One scarcely knows if he would be of more use to us as a hostage, or set loose to be a very bad enemy leader.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

We see the world not as it is, but as we are. ~ Dag Redwing hickory Bluefield

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Her eyes were full of new; it made them brighter

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Words won't break bones seemed like the lying-est lie Barr had ever been told, as a child. Bones knit eventually, he knew from close personal experience. The scars of slander, an insult not just delivered but believed, might never heal in a lifetime.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

"Thing is... she may get mad, but she isn't whiny or naggy about it. She doesn't store it up like a, a compost heap, all hot on the inside and rotting. She's angry like she has a right, and no one disputes it." She added after a moment, "Or tells her to be a good girl, or be quiet, or apologize. Or go to her room" ~ Lily Mason, on why she admires Captain Amma

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I don't take information and experience into my mind in that organized a fashion, but when I want to bring it out, somehow it's there. You write what you know because — like there's another choice? The trick is to try and know as much as possible.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Don't worry about that depressing old dictum "Write what you know". If you need to know something, look it up. Learn how to find out what you need to know to make it right. Be passionate, be picky, have enough self-criticism to demand of yourself your best and not sort of let it slide by. And remember that the greatest defect any piece of fiction can have is not to be finished.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Some fortunate, prolific writers seem to be able, efficiently, to keep several projects going at once; it appears I am not one of them.

— 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 don’t write stories to tell readers what to think, or even tell them what I think; I write stories to show me what I think. Writing is always a journey of discovery that way, as suspenseful for me as I hope it will be for the audience.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better — when you can get it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I cannot emphasize enough that I do not start with a plan or agenda and mechanically manipulate characters and events to carry it out. I set characters in motion, and let them teach me what the book is.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

On the sixth day God saw He couldn’t do it all, it read, so He created engineers.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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. That’s all.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees—M.S., M.D., Ph.D...

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Of all the times to pick for this outbreak of idiocy, this has gotta be the worst possible. It’s got to be deliberate. Nothing this fouled up could be by chance.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The line of logic trailed off in confusion; he turned his thoughts impatiently from it. Mental wheel-spinning, as unproductive as philosophy class in college.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I don’t know whose judgement is worse, yours or the jerk’s who hired you—

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Claire, listen to me. The proper response to Bruce isn’t suicide, it’s murder.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

GalacTech’s not God, Claire. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your firstborn to it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

There are weapons all around us here, we just don’t recognize them because we call them “tools.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Even soldiers in battle have to be brought to a special state of mental excitement to shoot total strangers.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

This isn’t a class. This is real life.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

God’s not here. Somebody’s got to fill in.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“We’ve run into a problem, Leo.”“But of course. Who ever tracks me down to impart good news?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

We make our own luck. And it’s my responsibility to see it’s good and not bad.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

He loathed letting her push his buttons; still, she had a valid point: cover-your-ass was a fundamental rule for survival even of the fittest.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose.”“Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

He gave himself up to God and pressed the button.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Smoke test?...What’s that?”...“It’s an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project,” Leo explained. “Turn it on, see if it smokes.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

If it ever came down to exerting power by force, it would mean I'd already lost it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I suppose my determination to be a soldier stems from that date. I mean the real thing, not the parades and the uniforms and the glamour, but the logistics, the offensive advantage, the speed and surprise — the power. A better-prepared, stronger, tougher, faster, meaner son-of-a-bitch than any who came through that door.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what's on the other side.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

He said that permitting private judgments to turn my duty in the smallest matter would be just like getting a little bit pregnant — that the consequences would very soon get beyond me.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Most days it's just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Stand before his grave and use your gift of breath to complain of your limited time. If you dare.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

East is west, up is down, and being falsely arrested for getting your C.O.'s throat cut is a simplification. I must be on Barrayar.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or 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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Why shouldn't a madman dream of being sane?

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Don't be afraid. The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The good face pain. But the great — they embrace it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Any community's 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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

With all this manure around, there's got to be a pony someplace.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Check your assumptions. In fact, check your assumptions at the door.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

You can't choose between evil and evil, in the dark, by logic. You can only cling to some safety line of principle.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I have no right to risk. No, that's not quite correct. I have no right to failure. And I don't trust myself anymore. I don't know what's happened to my edge. Lost it in a strange land.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I planned my life by the hour as closely as one plans a year, and no further than an hour.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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?

— 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

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

My home is not a place, it is people.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It's... a transcendental act. Making life. I thought about that when I was carrying Miles. 'By this act, I bring one death into the world.' One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Live, and so confound our enemies.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Our children change us…whether they live or not.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

She didn't feel anything, no grief or remorse, though her heart was racing and her breath came in gasps. A shocky combat-high, that immortal rush that made men charge machine guns. So this was what the war-addicts came for.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I would fight the world for you, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to save you from yourself.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Oh, but he's my monster.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

What you are is a question only you can answer.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

It's never too late while you're breathing.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

I guess it just doesn't look very heroic to sneak up behind somebody and shoot them in the back. I can't help thinking it would be more efficient, though.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless — one ought to at least have to grunt for it.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and materials to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival — to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory — organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Heroes. They sprang up around him like weeds. A carrier, he was seemingly unable to catch the disease he spread.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

How can I give you up? You're the mountains and the lake, the memories — you have them all. When you're with me, I'm at home, wherever I am.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Acting or reacting, we carry him in us. You can't walk away from him any more than I can. Whether you travel toward or away, he'll be the compass. He'll be the glass, full of subtle colors and astigmatisms, through which all new things will be viewed. I too have a father who haunts me, and I know.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

When the time came to leap in faith, whether you had your eyes open or closed or screamed all the way down or not made no practical difference.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Hunting hawks do not belong in cages, no matter how much a man covets their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They are far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Think of the glory. Think of your reputation. Think how great it'll look on your next resume."

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold