Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

226 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
"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
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
Strange mercies, Illyan. You kill me so courteously.

Lois McMaster Bujold