Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

226 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Lois McMaster Bujold
Strange mercies, Illyan. You kill me so courteously.

Lois McMaster Bujold
You have a reputation as a bold Barrayaran barbarian—say that six times really fast—too dangerous to let loose.

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

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
'It didn't work, so let's do it some more'? In my line of work, they call that military stupidity. I don't know what they call it in civilian life.

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

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

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

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