Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.

Pym looked at the bugs, glanced at the sleeve of his proud uniform, stared again at the deadly parody of his insignia the creatures now bore, and shot Miles a look of heartbreaking despair, a silent cry which Miles had no trouble interpreting as, Please, m'lord, please, can we take him out and kill him now?

“You have the instincts of a gentleman, Ivan,” said Miles, absorbed in breaking into the coded files. “How did you ever get into security?

Miles is... Miles; close to a force of nature, climbing up out of his own pages and escaping subordination to any opinion of mine.

One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.

The last thing a monster wanted was a fellow to follow him around all day long with a mirror.

Of all the times to pick for this outbreak of idiocy, this has gotta be the worst possible. It’s got to be deliberate. Nothing this fouled up could be by chance.

If power was an illusion, wasn’t weakness necessarily one also?

"Just what kind of noose are you offering to put round my neck, here? Is this treason?" "Worse," Cazaril sighed. "Theology."

Emperors per se did not unnerve Miles . . . . Emperor Gregor had been raised along with Miles practically as his foster-brother; somewhere in the back of Miles's mind the term emperor was coupled with such identifiers as somebody to play hide-and-seek with. In this context those hidden assumptions could be a psychosocial land mine.

"I know my limits." "No one knows their limits till they've gone beyond them."

“Does it seem strange…does it give you a very different view of your parents, to see them on vid?”
“No,” he said. “It gives me a very different view of holovids.”

Don’t promote your troubles beyond your rank.

I saw no reason to stop my life for other people’s theories.

Vorreedi, Miles reminded himself, was Intelligence, not Counter-intelligence; curiosity, not paranoia, was his driving force.