Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

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

I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

The world is made by the people who show up for the job.

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

All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.