Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

“If I got assassinated now,” he shrugged helplessly, “my father would kill me.”

All Mark knew was that if it came down to a choice between Kareen and oxygen, he’d prefer to give up oxygen, thanks.

Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

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

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.

Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention.

He should be keeping reality and fantasy separate in his own mind, at least, even while mixing them as much as possible in others’.

It occurred to him that the attitude of supplication was identical to that of surrender on a battlefield.

A mercenary who can’t honor his contract when it’s rough as well as smooth is a thug, not a soldier.

You’re worse than evil. You’re inefficient.

I don't take information and experience into my mind in that organized a fashion, but when I want to bring it out, somehow it's there. You write what you know because — like there's another choice? The trick is to try and know as much as possible.

"Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word.

"Equals?" Miles hazarded.

"Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously."

“Well, I don’t hate him. I can’t say I worship him, either.” She paused a long time, and looked up to meet her mother’s eyes squarely. “But when he’s cut, I bleed.”

“Is that going to be a problem?” said Ivan.
“Definitely. I just don’t know what kind, yet. Or whose.”

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.