Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

I cannot emphasize enough that I do not start with a plan or agenda and mechanically manipulate characters and events to carry it out. I set characters in motion, and let them teach me what the book is.

I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."

One couldn’t fix the past, only the present.

It’s a moribund body anyway, afflicted with the narrowest conservatism and stuffed with old relics only concerned with protecting their privileges. I’m not sure anything can be done with the Counts in the long run. Perhaps they should finally be allowed to dodder over the brink of extinction.

Still, what d’you expect of the descendants of a colony that started as a hijacker base? Naturally they developed into an aristocracy.

Something I did not know at twenty,” said Nikys slowly, “that I do know at thirty, is that when a woman marries a man, she marries his life. And it had better be the life she wants to lead.

I can’t quit, once I’ve started. I’ve been told I’m pathologically persistent. I can’t quit.

He had his idea-fixee now, and its ramifications and his rage were an effective block against incoming data.

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force—

People complaining about their spouses always looked and sounded so ugly.

There are weapons all around us here, we just don’t recognize them because we call them “tools.”

In the long run more mercenaries have had their asses shot off by their contractors than by their enemies.

"You must go home eventually." "I would throw myself off a precipice first, except that I would land in the arms of the gods, Whom I do not wish to see again."

So far from a trudge, she seemed to find the task tolerably amusing.
“Oh, languages aren’t work,” she explained cheerily. “They’re a game. Now, economics, that’s boring.”

I'd storm heaven for you, if I knew where it was.