Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

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

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
Just because we're adults doesn't automatically mean we can save you...

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

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

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

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

Lois McMaster Bujold
"Most men", he quoted, "are of naught more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into shit."
Ivan cocked an eyebrow at him. "Who said that? Your grandfather?"
"Leonardo da Vinci," Miles returned primly. But was compelled to add, "Grandfather quoted it to me, though."

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

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

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

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

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

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
People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

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

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