Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

A contractor, early? Really? Already your tale begins to resemble some drunken hallucination.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

“What a barbaric custom.”
“Well, we could treat crime as a disease, like you Betans. You know what that’s like. At least we kill a man cleanly, all at once, instead of in bits over the years….I don’t know.”
“How will they…do it?”
“Beheading. It’s supposed to be almost painless.”
“How do they know?”
His laugh was totally without humor. “A very cogent question.”

He didn’t exactly have a plan, yet. More of a stab in the dark. He still wasn’t sure what his blade would connect with…

As long as I’m going to commit a crime, let it be a perfect one.

He wouldn’t say pray, as he’d decided long ago not to bother the gods with questions when he didn’t really want to hear the answers.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

There were security angles, political angles, personal angles—how many angles could dance on the head of a pin?

So the difference between a criminal and a hero is the order in which their vile crimes are committed. And justice comes with a sell-by date. In that case, you’d better hurry. You wouldn't want your heroism to spoil.

I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.

Anyway, she now realized, the military histories she’d read had left out the most important part; they never told what happened to people’s babies.

We make our own luck. And it’s my responsibility to see it’s good and not bad.

Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.

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 learned long ago not to exhaust myself grappling problems that time will carry away on its tide.