Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

American novelist (born 1949)

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Lois McMaster Bujold (born 2 November 1949, Columbus, Ohio) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy works, most noted for the works in her Vorkosigan Saga.

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I’m sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.

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.

“Suffering bastard.”
“I thought you saw meaning in that sort of thing,” said Vorkosigan.
“In the abstract. Most days it’s just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.”

But exile, for no other motive than ease—that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.

“Things going well for your side, are they?” she asked, oppressed.
“We’re becoming nicely overextended. Some people regard that as progress.”

East is west, up is down, and being falsely arrested for getting your C.O.’s throat cut is a simplification. I must be on Barrayar.

He said that permitting private judgments to turn my duty in the smallest matter would be just like getting a little bit pregnant—that the consequences would very soon get beyond me.

This war nonsense was a great psychological education. That chronometer had to be wrong. Surely it had been a year, and not an hour…

No fear trembled his voice. Well, she reflected, perhaps he was not old enough yet to have really come to believe in death after life.

So in the physics of the heart, distance is relative; it’s time that’s absolute.

I’m sure we’d all rather be clever than brave.

Do you know, I think you’d like politics at least on Barrayar. Maybe because it’s so similar to what we call war, elsewhere.

It’s a moribund body anyway, afflicted with the narrowest conservatism and stuffed with old relics only concerned with protecting their privileges. I’m not sure anything can be done with the Counts in the long run. Perhaps they should finally be allowed to dodder over the brink of extinction.

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a lunatic?”
“Not in this context.”

I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what’s on the other side.