Lois McMaster Bujold - Shards of Honor (1986)

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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
I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.

Lois McMaster Bujold
East is west, up is down, and being falsely arrested for getting your C. O.'s throat cut is a simplification. I must be on Barrayar.

Lois McMaster Bujold
The good face pain. But the great — they embrace it.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.

Lois McMaster Bujold
I'm sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.

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

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
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
Most days it's just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.

Lois McMaster Bujold
He said that permitting private judgments to turn my duty in the smallest matter would be just like getting a little bit pregnant — that the consequences would very soon get beyond me.

Lois McMaster Bujold
If it ever came down to exerting power by force, it would mean I'd already lost it.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold
I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what's on the other side.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.

Lois McMaster Bujold
A price is something you get. A cost is something you lose.

Lois McMaster Bujold
I suppose my determination to be a soldier stems from that date. I mean the real thing, not the parades and the uniforms and the glamour, but the logistics, the offensive advantage, the speed and surprise — the power. A better-prepared, stronger, tougher, faster, meaner son-of-a-bitch than any who came through that door.

Lois McMaster Bujold