Lois McMaster Bujold quotes

“If you can't do what you want, do what you can.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do 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.”

— 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

“Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“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.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“My home is not a place, it is people.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“
Our children change us... whether they live or not.
”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“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

“I am who I choose to be. I always have been what I chose…though not always what I pleased.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.”

— 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

“You try to give away what you want yourself.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“An honor is not diminished for being shared.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“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

“If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“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

“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