Lois McMaster Bujold > Quotes

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Labyrinth

“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

“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, Memory

“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

“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.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Labyrinth

“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

“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, Shards of Honour

“Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“My home is not a place, it is people.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

“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

“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

“Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

“A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game

“I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

“I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

“The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Miles in Love

“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.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity

“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, The Warrior's Apprentice

“You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“The world is made by the people who show up for the job.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, CryoBurn

“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

“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity

“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.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

“The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms