Best 204 quotes of Lois Mcmaster Bujold on MyQuotes

All true wealth is biological.

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

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, a scientist, an artist, or an entrepreneur. In service of their goals, they lay down time, energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self.

All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

And this was your friend?" Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

Any communitys 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.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor

A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.

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.

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.

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

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.

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?

Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

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

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.

Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it.

Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.

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

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.

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.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

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

Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?" "Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.

Honor is what you know about yourself.

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?

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

I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.

I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe." "'Know thyself.'" "We try, sir.

I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.

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

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

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