"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (A Civil Campaign)

"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 (Shards of Honour)

"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 (Komarr)

"Money, power, sex ... and elephants."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Memory)

"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."
— 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 (Barrayar)

"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. "
— Lois McMaster Bujold

"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."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Mirror Dance)

"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."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (The Curse of Chalion)

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

"The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Brothers in Arms)

"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."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Memory)

"I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Mirror Dance)

"An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo!"
— Jim Butcher (Blood Rites)

"Of course Evil's afoot. If it had switched to the metric system it'd be up to a meter by now. "
— Jim Butcher