Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

Your “accidents,” I once noticed, have ways of entangling your enemies that are the green envy of mature and careful strategists. Far too consistent for chance, I concluded it had to be unconscious will.

Geography is the mother of strategy.

The job was interesting for a week, while he was learning it, mind-numbing after that.

Mercenaries thrive on other people’s chaos.

“This isn’t a good war game, Dad says,” commented Miles. “Not enough random factors and uncontrolled surprises to simulate reality.”

“Other than that, how was Kiril Island, Ensign Vorkosigan?” inquired the Count. “You didn’t vid home much, your mother noticed.”
“I was busy. Lessee. The climate was ferocious, the terrain was lethal, a third of the population including my immediate superior was dead drunk most of the time. The average IQ equalled the mean temperature in degrees cee, there wasn’t a woman for five hundred kilometers in any direction, and the base commander was a homicidal psychotic. Other than that, it was lovely.”

Your moral scruples may be admirable, Miles, but I’m not sure I can afford them.

The facts appear to be mutating every forty minutes. like bacteria.

Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.

If we shouldn’t do it, we shouldn’t be able to do it.

When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a godlike being, not a, a...future subordinate. New ensigns were supposed to be a subhuman species anyway.

He’s not like anything, Ahn. He’s the original.

Pain hurts, sir. I don’t court it.

We don’t just march on the future, we charge it.

Peace to you, small lady, he thought to Raina. You’ve won a twisted poor modern knight, to wear your favor on his sleeve. But it’s a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation. But at least I won’t just tilt at windmills for you. I’ll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers, and blast them into the sky…
He knew who he served now. And why he could not quit. And why he must not fail.