Lois McMaster Bujold - Time Quotes

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Miles started to track the vote, but by the time the roll came around to him, had taken to jotting repeated iterations of Lady Ekaterin Nile Vorkosigan intertwined with Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan in his fanciest handwriting down the margins of his flimsy.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Oh, was that liquor of yours a stimulant?" asked Elena. "I wondered why he didn't fall asleep." "Couldn't you tell?" chuckled Mayhew. "Not really." Miles twisted his head to take in Elena's upside-down worried face, and smile in weak reassurance. Sparkly black and purple whirlpools clouded his vision. Mayhew's laughter faded. "My God," he said hollowly, "you mean he's like that all the time?

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

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

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

Lois McMaster Bujold
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.

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

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

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

Lois McMaster Bujold
All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters.

Lois McMaster Bujold