Quotes by Lois McMaster Bujold

At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.

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 its always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesnt involve losing bowel control.

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.

But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man.

(Watching her) was a little like watching water lilies; rather more like smelling a dinner he was not allowed to eat. Was it possible to be starved for so long as to forget the taste of food, for the pangs of hunger to burn out like ash? It seemed so. But both the pleasure and the pain were his heart’s secret, here. He was put in mind, suddenly, of the soil at the edge of a recovering blight; the weedy bedraggled look of it, unlovely yet hopeful. Blight was a numb gray thing, without sensation. Did the return of green life hurt? Odd thought.

You dont pay back your parents. You cant. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. Its a sort of entailment. Or if you dont have children of the body, its 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. Its the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you arent bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

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.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

Dont wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what youre best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

Dont let fear swallow all your happiness. Dont forget to take joy. Dag gulped. Both of their grounds were nearly closed. It was Arkadys voice alone that hinted how hard-bought this bit of wisdom mightve been, yet the words had been nearly toneless.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents dont make children--children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too

And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

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

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 cant give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. Ive 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.

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

This wasnt 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.

And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountains peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.

Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time--these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.

You? I know you! You trust beyond reason.She met his eyes steadily. Yes. Its how I get results beyond hope. As you may recall.