Top 15 Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

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.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.

The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

My home is not a place, it is people.

But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?

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

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

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