Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

"War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in War quotes.

"A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"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 in Desire quotes.

"Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Defeat quotes.

"My home is not a place, it is people."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Home quotes.

"How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?"
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Humility quotes.

"By their essential nature triumphs can't be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can't be gifts."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"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."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Children quotes.

"If you can't do what you want, do what you can."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"I am who I choose to be. I always have been what I chose…though not always what I pleased."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Maturity quotes.

"What you are is a question only you can answer."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"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?"
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?"
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Honor quotes.

"...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

"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

"If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?"
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Power quotes.

"Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Parents quotes.

"You have to be careful who you let define your good."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear."
-Lois McMaster Bujold

"Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Honor quotes.

"Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Children quotes.

"They imagine they're the wave of the future, but it's only sewage flowing downhill."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Imagination quotes.

"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

"Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins."
-Lois McMaster Bujold in Love quotes.