Lois McMaster Bujold citations

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“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.”

“When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”

“I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“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.”

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

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

“Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection.”

“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?”

“Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.”

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

“Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be.”

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

“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.”

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.”

“When the time came to leap in faith, whether you had your eyes open or closed or screamed all the way down or not made no practical difference.”

“Aim high. You may still miss the target but at least you won’t shoot your foot off.”

“The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know.”

“The world is made by the people who show up for the job.”

“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.”

“The will to be stupid is a very powerful force.”

“Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.”

“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”

“We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.”

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

“One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.”

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

“I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.”

“An honor is not diminished for being shared.”

“On the sixth day God saw He couldn't do it all, so He created ENGINEERS”