Top 100 Bujold Quotes
#1. You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.
Cordelia's Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold
#2. I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#4. 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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#6. No, amusing me only, I wonder if they realize how they are used?"
"Not a bit. They think they are the emperors of creation."
"Poor lambs."
"That's not how I'd describe them."
"I was thinking of animal sacrifice."
"Ah. That's closer.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#7. 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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#8. Very good. But your most insidious chronic problem is in the area of . . . how shall I put this precisely . . . subordination. You argue too much." "No, I don't," Miles began indignantly, then shut his mouth.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#9. I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#12. Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)
Lois McMaster Bujold
#13. Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#14. I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again.
Genevieve Bujold
#15. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#16. The problem has just suddenly become a lot more interesting. Er, difficult. It's just become a bit more difficult.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#17. The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#19. Miles swallowed icy spit. 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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#22. [Koudelka] looked back, "You?! I know you! You trust beyond reason!"
[Cordelia] met his eyes steadily, "Yes, it's how I get results beyond hope, as you may recall.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#24. A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman's breasts and cry
even if he is at a convenient height for it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#25. I had to discover and teach myself all kinds of tricks to get people to respond to the inside of me, and not the outside.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#26. Like swatting flies with a laser cannon. The aim's a bit tricky, but it sure takes care of the flies.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#27. Women shouldn't be in combat," said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. "Neither should men, in my opinion.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#28. Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods."
"Do you?"
"I believe they are not here, yes. It's a faith of sorts.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#29. That last gallop had flayed her raw skin to shreds. "Saddle sores. Trivial hurts, for all that they are mine." His brows rose. "What do you call severe, then?" She staggered away past the beheaded commander. "That.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#30. It indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one's own discomfort for a benefit to another.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#32. Egalitarians adjust to aristocracies just fine, as long as they get to be the aristocrats.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#33. A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#34. She opened her mouth once to speak, closed it, then finally ripped out, "Why aren't you on your way home? I gave you an order, Lieutenant!" Stuben, anticipating a warmer reception, was momentarily nonplussed. "We took a vote," he said simply, as though it explained everything. Cordelia
Lois McMaster Bujold
#35. Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. 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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#36. I'd have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#41. I always thought my parents could fix anything. Now it's my turn. Dear God, how did this happen?
Lois McMaster Bujold
#42. Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't Panic."
"I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining .
Lois McMaster Bujold
#43. Sorry, Bill. I just have this awful vision of being p-peeled like an onion, looking for the seeds."
He grinned. "Onions don't have seeds, Cordelia."
"I stand corrected," she said dryly.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#44. The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs. If you are become their tool, it is for a greater reason, an urgent reason. But you are the tool. You are not the work.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#48. Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#49. The Emperor's Birthday is the traditional end of the fiscal year, for each count's district in relation to the Imperial government. In other words, it's tax day, except - the Vor are not taxed. That would imply too subordinate a relationship to the Imperium. Instead, we give the Emperor a present.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#50. I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can't be given.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#52. Lord X was a tyrant, not a revolutionary. He wanted to take over the system, not change it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#53. Your divine should not have used water. It just doesn't hold the attention properly. Wine. Or blood, in a pinch. Some liquid that matters.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#54. It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#55. A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He - or she - freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#60. He didn't think he was edging into dementia. He suspected he was edging into sanity, the long way around. The hard way.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#61. Could you people stop trying to come up with novel ways to kill me for just ONE HOUR? Or maybe the rest of the night? I would SO like that. Just the rest of the night. Just sit down. Just stop doing anything. Sit down and wait sensibly. Earth, water, air, fire - you're running out of elements here!
Lois McMaster Bujold
#62. It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#63. The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#64. Well, one couldn't help one's thoughts. One could help opening one's mouth and saying something really stupid, though.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#65. Guards, Miles now realized, had to stay in prison all day long too. Indeed, as a guard, one of his jobs was now to keep himself in.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#66. If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#67. There it is! Do it or I'll have (my mother) do it for you! How's that for a threat?"
"Effective.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#68. The gods did not desire flawless souls, but great ones. I think that very darkness is where the greatness grows from, as flowers from the soil. I am not sure, in fact, if greatness can bloom without it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#69. This is important! But you have to stay absolutely cool. I may be completely off-base, and panicking prematurely."
"I don't think so. I think you're panicking post-maturely. In fact, if you were panicking any later it would be practically posthumously. I've been panicking for days.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#70. ImpSec certainly hadn't given him any more interesting missions, unless you could call Security Chief Illyan's last curt ". . . and stay out of trouble!" a secret assignment. On
Lois McMaster Bujold
#71. Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don't make children
children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too
Lois McMaster Bujold
#72. It was a curious insight into Vorkosigan that he should so automatically accept her bare word as binding; he evidently thought along the same lines himself. The
Lois McMaster Bujold
#73. At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#74. She had switched from counting her years not up from birth, but back from death - a grab-bag of time not growing, but shrinking, use it or lose it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#75. A Caligula, or a Yuri Vorbarra, can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#76. For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#77. Damn it," he mumbled apologetically, "things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold."
She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer
Lois McMaster Bujold
#78. Everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#79. 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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#81. Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#83. But though you'd never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall - when you fall, you're going to fall like a starving man.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#84. He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#85. One foot in front of the other, wasn't that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#86. When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#87. Not that people did much sailing on Ylla's extensive oceans, nor swimming either - Yllan seawater tended to give humans strange rashes, and while humans were highly toxic morsels in the diet of the native sea monsters, the monsters were extremely stupid and kept not figuring this out.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#89. The Lady of Spring must love you dearly."
"As a teamster loves his mule that carries his baggage," said Cazaril bitterly, "whipping it over the high passes.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#90. Those five days we were locked up together at Vasa Luigi's, that wasn't an effect of the imprisonment, was it? That's the way you really are, when you're well?"
"Pretty much," he admitted.
"I've always wondered what adult hyperactives did for a living.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#91. I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#92. And the Bastard grant us ... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#93. I confess it, I love the camera. When it's not on me, I'm not quite alive.
Genevieve Bujold
#94. It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#95. Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#96. Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#97. People do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#99. Well, who wants to die in bed?" "You did, you always said. Of extreme old age, in bed, with somebody's wife." "Mine, by preference," Cazaril
Lois McMaster Bujold
#100. Some men just aren't cut for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.
Lois McMaster Bujold
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