Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Lois McMaster Bujold
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Lois McMaster Bujold.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
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.
I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.
When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.
I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.
Wikipedia is so dangerous.
For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.
I'm very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.
What you are is a question only you can answer.
Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.
Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.
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?
I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.
I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.
The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.
He's not too short. He's just... concentrated.
On the sixth day God saw He couldn't do it all, so He created ENGINEERS
I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.
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.
Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.
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.
Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.
One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including or perhaps especially the failures.
You try to give away what you want yourself.
It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.
Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard
Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
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.
Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.
Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't Panic." "I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining .
In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.
Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.
We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.
Real destiny takes everything-the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure-and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can't give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. I've come back from the dead to speak the truth to you. Real destiny gives you a mountain of life, and puts you on top of it.
Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.
Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.
If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.
I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
- Jimi Hendrix,
“The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.
Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.
If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.
All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.
Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?
Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.
When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.
I'm not getting it all sorted, she worried. I'm not getting it right. You are brilliant, the Voice reassured her. It is imperfect. So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.
Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?" "Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.
If you can't do what you want, do what you can.
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