Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes (383 quotes, page 4)

“Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

“Yes,” Vorkosigan agreed, “I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.”

Chapter 4 (p. 60)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

“And what goes on in the head of a walking dead man? What personal failure could he possibly fear more than death itself?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

Death , Fear , Failure , Personality

“You can't give power away and keep it simultaneously. Except posthumously.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

“If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, choose learning. It works more of the time.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 14 (pp. 273-274)

Learning , Time

“Rule 1: Only overrule the tactical computer if you know something it doesn't. Rule 2: The tac comp always knows more than you do.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

“The best strategies run on rails. Live or die, you make your goal.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

“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 Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

“How can I give you up? You're the mountains and the lake, the memories — you have them all. When you're with me, I'm at home, wherever I am.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

Home , Mountain , Memory

“Three cheers for literacy… I feel sick.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

Feeling

“Lots of us SF-types like the idea of traveling to the Future (although, having now done so once myself -- the hard way -- I’m less sure), but why do we imagine the Future would want us? Oh, a few 21st-century Icemen, perhaps, as historical curiosities, but in our hundreds of millions? It would be like the greatest wave of immigration ever, but from the past into other people’s Now. It might seem to them like sacrificing resources needed for their children to their great-great-great-grandparents. Counter-evolutionary, among other things.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Geek Speak Magazine Interview (2010)

Children , People , Way , Travel

“Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

This evokes a statement in "Death of a Hired Man" by Robert Frost: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."
Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

Peaceful , Home

“There are a number of people in the universe I'd be willing to double-cross, but my own wounded aren't among 'em.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

People , Universe

“Taura nailed it. She'll do for m'lord, all right. And God help their enemies.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Winterfair Gifts (2008)

God , Help

“He found oddly little regret in his heart for his own lost life. He'd seen more of the world than most men ever did, and he'd had his chances, though the gods knew he'd made little enough of them. Marshaling his thoughts, as he sheltered under his covers, he realized with some wonder that his greatest dismay was for the work he'd be forced to leave undone.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 233

Life , Men , God , World

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 125

Love

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

"Putting It Together" p. 8
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)

Women

“It didn't work, so let's do it some more'? In my line of work, they call that military stupidity. I don't know what they call it in civilian life.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

Life , Stupidity

“I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what's on the other side.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 78)

“One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 296

Age , Fear , Learning

“I have denied my eyes, both inner and outer. I am not a child, or virgin, or modest wife, fearing to offend. No one owns my eyes now but me. If I have not the stomach by now to look upon any sight in the world, good or evil, beautiful or vile, when shall I? It is far too late for innocence. My only hope is the much more painful consolation of wisdom. Which can grow out of knowledge alone. Give me my true eyes. I want to see. I have to know.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 201

Wisdom , Pain , World , Fear

“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 Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988)

“"Do you know what this is, Lord Vorkosigan?" Giaja asked.
Miles eyed the medallion of the Order of Merit on its colored ribbon, glittering on a bed of velvet. "Yes, sir. It is a lead weight, suitable for sinking small enemies. Are you going to sew me into a silk sack with it, before you throw me overboard?"”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

Color

“How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Hell

“I am a much better person and a better writer having had my children than I would be otherwise. I would have missed a whole aspect of the human experience that's tremendously fundamental to things like characterization.
A lot of writers write as if the hero sort of popped out of the box at age 22 fully formed. And one thing that raising children does is give you some sense of how human beings really are put together. So when you go to put together a character you can have a more realistic sense of where people really come from, why they really behave the way they do and what a tremendous amount of life and complexity lies behind every human being.
But I think you can get that from being a father too. I think it's something you can do by growing up and being observant even if you don't have children.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

A Girl's World interview (2006)

Life , Children , People , Age

“Some fellows you have to hit with a brick to get their attention. Some you have to hit with a BIG brick.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

“Adversity does teach who your real friends are.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

“The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless — one ought to at least have to grunt for it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

Light

“Mark's own taste in women, if ever he should live to exercise it, ran more to something like that little blonde clone…Somebody short, soft, pink, timid, somebody who wouldn't kill and eat him after they mated.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

Women , Exercises

“There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Ethan of Athos (1986)

“The last thing a monster wanted was a fellow to follow him around all day long with a mirror.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

“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 Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

“Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Correspondence with feminist scholar and author Sylvia Kelso, published in Women of Other Worlds (1999), also quoted in "Women’s Hero Journey : An Interview With Lois McMaster Bujold on Paladin of Souls by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net (June 2009) http://womenwriters.net/june09/paladin_interview.html

Women , Maternity

“I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better — when you can get it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Young Miles (1997), "Author's Afterword"

“Cynicism did not seem nearly so impressively daring to her now as it had when she was twenty.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Komarr (1998)

“I was never a mercenary, not ever. Not for one single minute.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

“Hands are integral with brains, almost another lobe for intelligence. What one does not know through one's hands, one does not truly know.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

Intelligence

“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 Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

War , Peace

“Live, and so confound our enemies.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

“Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

Love , Life , Study

“Those who do not know their history are doomed to keep stepping in it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

This evokes the famous statement by George Santayana in The Life of Reason Vol. 1 (1905): "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

History

“You can't choose between evil and evil, in the dark, by logic. You can only cling to some safety line of principle.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

Evil

“If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 58

Hope

“I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and others don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to — that I wrote for myself — seem to do the best of all.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

"'A Conversation With Lois McMaster Bujold", p. 54
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)