Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

"Women’s Hero Journey : An Interview With Lois McMaster Bujold on Paladin of Souls by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net (June 2009)

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)
Variant: The principal difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.

The Curse of Chalion (2000)
Context: "Mercy from the Father and the Mother, mercy from the Sister and the Brother, Mercy from the Bastard, five times mercy, High Ones, we beseech you."… Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice.

Dag Redwing hickory Bluefield

Passage (Vol. III in Tetralogy) (2008), p. 163
The Sharing Knife, Passage (Vol. III in Tetralogy) (2008)

Vorkosigan Saga, "The Flowers of Vashnoi" (2018)

Source: The Curse of Chalion

Vorkosigan Saga, Winterfair Gifts (2008)

Source: Falling Free

Source: Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 61

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 61

"Putting It Together" p. 6
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Source: Cordelia's Honor

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

Source: Komarr

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity (2002)

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)
Context: 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.

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)
Context: The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort, or security, not family or friends or their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And … they won.

Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Context: I suppose my determination to be a soldier stems from that date. I mean the real thing, not the parades and the uniforms and the glamour, but the logistics, the offensive advantage, the speed and surprise — the power. A better-prepared, stronger, tougher, faster, meaner son-of-a-bitch than any who came through that door.

The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Context: Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind.

"'A Conversation With Lois McMaster Bujold", an interview with Lillian Stewart Carl, p. 52

Cordelia's Honor (1996), "Author's Afterword"
Context: All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and 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. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.

A Girl's World interview (2006)

Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
Context: Acting or reacting, we carry him in us. You can't walk away from him any more than I can. Whether you travel toward or away, he'll be the compass. He'll be the glass, full of subtle colors and astigmatisms, through which all new things will be viewed. I too have a father who haunts me, and I know.

Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Context: Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)
Context: 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 sort of respect to you, as though it were some 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.

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)
Context: No, no, never send interim reports. Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must either then obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem.

Paladin of Souls (2003)
Context: You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.

p. 36

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)
Context: The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort, or security, not family or friends or their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And … they won.

A Girl's World interview (2006)
Context: Don't worry about that depressing old dictum "Write what you know". If you need to know something, look it up. Learn how to find out what you need to know to make it right. Be passionate, be picky, have enough self-criticism to demand of yourself your best and not sort of let it slide by. And remember that the greatest defect any piece of fiction can have is not to be finished.

Cordelia's Honor (1996), "Author's Afterword"
Context: All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and 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. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)
Context: Marta blinked at him with manufactured innocence. "Kareen had it from Mark. I had it from Ivan. Mama had it from Gregor. And Da had it from Pym. If you're trying to keep it a secret, Miles, why are you going around telling everyone"?

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)
Context: You must kill if you expect to survive."
"No you don't," Miles put in. "Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)
Context: 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?

Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
Context: Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and materials to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival — to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory — organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)
Context: 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.

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)
Context: 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.

"Publishing, Writing, and Authoring", p. 67
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Context: I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."

Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)
Context: 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.

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

Source: Memory

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 15 (p. 235)
Source: Shards of Honour

Source: Labyrinth

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 316

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

Source: The Curse of Chalion

Cordelia's Honor (1996), "Author's Afterword"

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

Vorkosigan Saga, Komarr (1998)
Source: Miles in Love

Source: CryoBurn

Source: Komarr

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity (2002)

Source: Diplomatic Immunity

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991), Chapter 18 (p. 549)

Source: The Curse of Chalion

Aftermaths (p. 253)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Source: Shards of Honour

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)
Variant: When you can't get what you want, you take what you can get.
Source: Miles Errant

Source: A Civil Campaign