Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

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

You try to give away what you want yourself.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

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

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

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

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

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

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