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Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes
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Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is one of the most acclaimed writers in her field, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record, not counting his Retro Hugo. Her novella "The Mountains of Mourning" won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. In 2013 she was awarded the Forry Award. In 2017 she won a Hugo Award for Best Series, for the Vorkosigan Saga.

The bulk of Bujold's works comprises three separate book series: the Vorkosigan Saga, the Chalion Series, and the Sharing Knife series.

✵ 2. November 1949
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Lois McMaster Bujold: 383   quotes 7   likes

Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

“Why did so many antique myths agree that hell was a circular place?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Hell

“Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 313

God

“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 Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

History , Time

“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 Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

Sleep , Chance

“Peace to you, small lady. You've won a twisted poor modern knight, to wear your favor on his sleeve. But it's a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation. But at least I won't just tilt at windmills for you. I'll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers and blow them into the sky. He knew who he served now. And why he could not quit. And why he must not fail”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Mountains of Mourning (1989)

Peace , World

“Confusion to the enemy.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

“I smell diplomacy.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity (2002)

“You are what you do.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

“Biology is Destiny.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

“Oh, but he's my monster.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

“Such a perilous concentration of demons would create chaos all around it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

"War gathers on these borders," said Ista. "A greater concentration of chaos I can hardly imagine."

p. 281
Paladin of Souls (2003)

Lois McMaster Bujold quote: “The gods…the gods may forgive much, to a truly penitent heart.”

“The gods…the gods may forgive much, to a truly penitent heart.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

Her smile grew bitter as desert brine. "The gods may forgive Ista all day long. But if Ista does not forgive Ista, the gods may go hang themselves."

p. 61
Paladin of Souls (2003)

Forgiveness , God , Heart

“Her eyes were full of new; it made them brighter.”

Lois McMaster Bujold The Sharing Knife

Loc 1972 of 2974
The Sharing Knife, Knife Children (2019)

“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.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 36

Problem

“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.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000)

Sister , Justice , Fools , Time

“What a strange world you must live in, inside your head.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Aftermaths (p. 252)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

World

“A person’s things can be a kind of exterior morphology of their mind.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Aftermaths (p. 247). Note: Aftermaths was originally published as a standalone short story in 1986, but since then has usually been reprinted as a sort of appendix to Shards of Honor, which it follows naturally in the series arc.
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

Personality

“I’ve always felt that theists were more ruthless than atheists.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

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

“Women shouldn’t be in combat, said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. Neither should men, in my opinion.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 14 (p. 223)

Women , Men

“The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 9 (p. 141)

Anger , Beauty , Future , Hope

“Things going well for your side, are they?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

She asked, oppressed. “We’re becoming nicely overextended. Some people regard that as progress.”

Chapter 8 (p. 129)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

“No fear trembled his voice. Well, she reflected, perhaps he was not old enough yet to have really come to believe in death after life.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 7 (p. 101)

Fear , Life , Death

“So in the physics of the heart, distance is relative; it’s time that’s absolute.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 6 (p. 97)

Time , Heart

“I’m sure we’d all rather be clever than brave.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 6 (p. 90)

“Do you know, I think you’d like politics at least on Barrayar. Maybe because it’s so similar to what we call war, elsewhere.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 81)

War , Thinking

“It’s a moribund body anyway, afflicted with the narrowest conservatism and stuffed with old relics only concerned with protecting their privileges. I’m not sure anything can be done with the Counts in the long run. Perhaps they should finally be allowed to dodder over the brink of extinction.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 81)

Affliction

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a lunatic?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

“Not in this context.”

Chapter 5 (p. 80; Vorkosigan has just proposed to Cordelia)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

“Captains may come and captains may go, but the administration goes on forever.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 74)

“I had a teacher who used to reflect back my questions that way. I thought it was the Socratic method, and it impressed me immensely, until I found out he used it whenever he didn’t know the answer.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

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

Way , Teachers , Question

“The old customs are dead, and we keep trying on new ones, like badly fitting clothes.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 3 (p. 50)

Clothes , Dead

“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.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 3 (pp. 43-44)

Bitch , Speed

“Save me from that! To pour your life into sons for eighteen or twenty years, and then have the government take them away and waste them cleaning up after some failure of politics—no thanks.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 3 (p. 41)

Life , Failure

“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.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 3 (p. 40)

Imagination

“And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 276)

“Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 266)

Thinking , People , Stupidity

“I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

“Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then.”

Chapter 14 (p. 256)
Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988)

“Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 254)

Waiting , Life , People

“We make our own luck. And it’s my responsibility to see it’s good and not bad.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 11 (p. 194)

Bad luck , Making love

“We’ve run into a problem.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

“But of course. Who ever tracks me down to impart good news?

Chapter 10 (p. 180)
Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988)

Problem

“The trouble with you, Ti, lectured Leo kindly, is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 9 (pp. 166-167)

Faith , People , Learning

“The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 9 (p. 166)

Way , Idea , Communication

“This isn’t a class. This is real life.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 8 (p. 152)

Life

“Even soldiers in battle have to be brought to a special state of mental excitement to shoot total strangers.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 8 (p. 143)

“There are weapons all around us here, we just don’t recognize them because we call them “tools.””

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 8 (p. 142)

“I don’t know whose judgement is worse, yours or the jerk’s who hired you—”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 5 (p. 101)

Jerk

“Of all the times to pick for this outbreak of idiocy, this has gotta be the worst possible. It’s got to be deliberate. Nothing this fouled up could be by chance.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 4 (p. 78)

Chance , Time

“Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal. That’s all.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 36)

Lie , Law , Fools , Men

“Stupidity, yes, but not unilateral stupidity. Something this screwed up had to have taken a committee.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991), Chapter 10 (p. 411)

Stupidity