Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Lois McMaster Bujold - Page 3

You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.

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

Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.

The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.

Honor is what you know about yourself.

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.

Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

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

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

The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.

They stared at her curiously, and she caught snatches of conversation in two or three languages. It wasn't hard to guess their content, and she smiled a bit primly. Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range - and with a coup to plan for the end.

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!

Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.

Our children change us... whether they live or not.

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?

I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself.

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

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

There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.

All true wealth is biological.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

[Koudelka] looked back, "You?! I know you! You trust beyond reason!" [Cordelia] met his eyes steadily, "Yes, it's how I get results beyond hope, as you may recall.

Second sight is redundant to reason anyway.

When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.

But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.

It is always easier to get forgiveness than permission.

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.

The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

Mia Maz glanced aside in concern at his muffled snort. "Are you all right?" "Yes. Sorry," he whispered. "I'm just having an attack of limericks." Her eyes widened, and she bit her lip; only her deepening dimple betrayed her. "Shhh," she said, with feeling.

A price is something you get. A cost is something you lose.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.

This is the most important thing I will ever say to you. The human mind is the ultimate testing device. You can take all the notes you want on the technical data, anything you forget you can look up again, but this must be engraved on your hearts in letters of fire. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity. Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool metal. That’s all.

A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.

Read, or you will be missing something extraordinary.

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

If there's no game, isn't winning a pretty meaningless concept?

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.

Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.

Miles is... Miles; close to a force of nature, climbing up out of his own pages and escaping subordination to any opinion of mine.

This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

One foot in front of the other, wasn't that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.

Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.

I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.