Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

I would fight the world for you, but I’m damned if I can figure out how to save you from yourself. Go for it, kid.

Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means “soldier,“ but don’t let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn’t going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.

Surely she was mad. She didn’t feel anything, no grief or remorse, though her heart was racing and her breath came in gasps. A shocky combat-high, that immortal rush that made men charge machine guns. So this was what the war-addicts came for.

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

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We’re not giving up. We’re waiting for a better opportunity to win.

Why have these people so blithely handed me the right to risk their lives? God, I hate command.

You have a little time yet. You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

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?

Any community’s arm of force—military, police, security—needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they’ll be called on to do before the next chance.

Our children change us…whether they live or not.

It’s...a transcendental act. Making life. I thought about that when I was carrying Miles. “By this act, I bring one death into the world.” One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between.

Anyway, she now realized, the military histories she’d read had left out the most important part; they never told what happened to people’s babies.

“You think like a soldier, m’lady.” Kly sounded approving.
Cordelia wrinkled her brow in dismay. What an appalling compliment. The last thing she wanted was to start thinking like a soldier, playing their game by their rules. The hallucinatory military worldview was horribly infectious, though, immersed in it as she was now.

My home is not a place, it is a person, sir.