Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

I have noticed a curious bifurcation in outcome in the way romances are written by women et written by men - Love Story, The Bridges of Madison County, every James Bond tale ever penned, even the film named above - end with the woman either lost or dead. And the man free to love, or at least to have sex, again. Romances (in the modern genre sense) written by women end with the couple alive, together, and in a committed and at least potentially fertile relationship, ready to turn to the work of their world. In other words, men's romances are about love and death; women's romances are about love and life.

All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it, just seems ... seems like a more profound complaint, somehow.

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.

Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.

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

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.

He who plots revenge must dig two graves.

Money, power, sex ... and elephants.

Miles, when he was contemplating this technology for my future grandchildren, wanted to start twelve at once and do them all in one efficient batch. Like growing his own platoon, I gather. I offered to take turns with Ekaterin holding his head under water till he had a better idea, but as it turned out, she didn't need my help. Wonderful girl, my daughter-in-law. I still don't know what he did to deserve her.

Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don't make children
children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too

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

Identity. That's my elephant. The thought came with certainty, without the question mark on the end this time. Not fame, exactly, though recognition was some kind of important cement for it. But what you were was what you did. And I did more, oh yes. If a hunger for identity were translated into, say, a hunger for food, he'd be a more fantastic glutton than Mark ever dreamed of being. Is it irrational, to want to be so much, to want so hard it hurts? And how much, then, was enough?

But I know you have courage, and I know you have will. The rest is just picking yourself up and ramming into the wall again and again until it falls down. You get a bloody forehead, so what? You can do it, I swear you can.

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.

You're pleased?" Rosalie, watching her face closely, sat back and smiled. "Or should I say, thrilled? Good! And not completely surprised, I daresay." "Not . . . completely." I just didn't believe it. I chose not to believe it, because . . . because it would have ruined everything. . . . "We were afraid you might find it early days, after Tien and all. But the Baba said he meant to steal a march on all his rivals, your da told Hugo.

Oh, what did she finally decide on?" asked the pilot. "At one point she told me she was thinking of sending the bride a barbed-wire choke chain for Miles, but was afraid it might be misinterpreted." "No

Could he stop denying himself, and deny others instead? He tested the phrases on his tongue. No, you are wrong, all of you, Temple and Court and folk in the streets. You always were wrong. I am not ... am not ... what? And are these the only terms I can think in, these shouted nos? Ah, habit.

Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease - that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.

Miles leaned forward and spoke earnestly into the secure holovid recorder. I just want you to know, Gregor, that if the planet melts down over all this, it wasn't my fault. The trip-wire was laid long before I stumbled across it.

How hard could husbanding be? Don't drink, don't gamble, don't bring hunting dogs to the table. Don't be terrified of tooth-drawers. Don't be stupid about money. Don't go for a soldier. No hitting girls. He wasn't drawn to violate any of these prohibitions. Assuming older sisters weren't classified as girls. Maybe make that, No hitting girls first.

Those five days we were locked up together at Vasa Luigi's, that wasn't an effect of the imprisonment, was it? That's the way you really are, when you're well?"
"Pretty much," he admitted.
"I've always wondered what adult hyperactives did for a living.

And the Bastard grant us ... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.

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

So, Lord Auditor Coz. Did you find some fun?

Do I look cheerful?

More like manic.

It's a joy, Ivan, an absolute joy. The ImpSec internal Security system is lying to me.

So, how long has my mother had this questionable fetish for bisexual Barrayaran admirals? I don't think even the Betans have earrings for that one.

I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.

A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He - or she - freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.

For Berry, you just be there, Whit. Be the one person in the wide green world she doesn't have to explain it to, because you were there and saw it all for yourself. Hand her a clean cloth if she cries or bleeds, and some warm thing for the pain that doubles her over. The time to hold her will come. This day isn't over yet.

I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique
'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'

Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods."
"Do you?"
"I believe they are not here, yes. It's a faith of sorts.

He bit his fingernails. He bit his toenails. He pulled tiny green threads from his shirt and tried flossing his teeth. Then he tried making little green designs with tiny, tiny knots. Then he hit on the idea of weaving messages. Could he macramé "Help, I am a prisoner . . ." and plant it on the back of someone's jacket by static charge? If someone ever came back, that is? He got as far as a delicate gossamer H, E, L, caught the thread on a hangnail while rubbing his stubbled chin, and reduced his plea to an illegible green wad. He pulled another thread and started over.

Hi, I'm a hero, but I can't tell you why. It's classified.

The world is ashes and the gods are a horror. Tell me, Learned, what other place is there for me to go?

My Lord, we wish to resign. Her smile, confusingly, crept wider, as if she just said something delightful.

I know what the value [of storytelling] is to me
varied and huge, giving me everything from delight, to knowledge, to access to friends and colleagues, a desirable identity through valued work, escape from pain, and a steady income. Not bad, for something so intangible as making and selling dream-by-number kits.

On the third, we got into troubles. Baz Jesek had gotten more and more involved with equipment and maintenance - he is a good engineer, I'll give him that - I was tactical commander, and Oser - I thought by default, but now I think design - took up the administrative slack. Could have been good, each doing what he did best, if Oser'd been working with and not against us. In the same situation, I'd have sent assassins. Oser employed guerilla accountants.

Arhys would have protected you from this choice, as a father would a beloved child. Arhys is wrong in this. I give you a woman's choice, here, at the last gasp. He looks to spare you pain this one night. I look to your nights for the next twenty years. There is neither right nor wrong in this, precisely. But the time to amend all choices runs out like Porifors's water.

Divide the infinite future into five-minute blocks, and take them one by one.

Integrity is a disease, and you can only catch it from someone who has it.

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.

Cute-and-furry was always an easier sell than carapaced-and-multilegged, for some obscure reason. Grownups, so unreasonable ...

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.

Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that
dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination.

She inhaled the complex odors, from vegetation, water vapor, industrial waste gases. Barrayar permitted an amazing amount of air dumping, as if . . . well, air was free, here. Nobody measured it; there were no air processing and filtration fees. Did these people even realize how rich they were? All the air they could breathe, just by stepping outdoors, taken for granted as casually as they took frozen water falling from the sky.

Miles watched the evening shadows flowing up along the backbone of the Dendarii range, high and massive in the distance. How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie. Had his father known this? Miles suspected so.

There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap."
"Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So - how did you make them stop?"
"You can't make them - whoever your particular them is - do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "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.

Damn it," he mumbled apologetically, "things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold."
She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer

If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

It was suicide, wasn't it?" "In an involuntary sort of way," said Vorob'yev. "These Cetagandan political suicides can get awfully messy, when the principal won't cooperate." "Thirty-two stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they ever saw?" murmured Ivan, clearly fascinated by the gossip. "Exactly, my lord.

The rather blurred background to the face that formed over the vid plate seemed faintly familiar - ah yes, the Security Ops room at Ryoval Biologicals. Baron Ryoval had arrived personally on that scene as promised. It took only one glance at the dusky, contorted expression on Ryoval's youthful face to fill in the rest of the scenario. Miles folded his hands and smiled innocently. "Good morning, Baron. What can I do for you?" "Die, you little mutant!" Ryoval spat. "You! There isn't going to be a bunker deep enough for you to burrow in. I'll put a price on your head that will have every bounty hunter in the galaxy all over you like a second skin - you'll not eat or sleep - I'll have you - " Yes,

That's nickering, not snickering." Miles grinned. He tapped Fat Ninny behind his left foreleg, and the horse obediently grunted down onto one knee. Miles clambered up readily to his conveniently lowered stirrup. "Does mine do that?" asked Dr. Dea, watching with fascination. "Sorry, no." Dea glowered at his horse. "This animal is an idiot. I shall lead it for a while." As

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

Galeni made her smile but not laugh. The lack of any sense of play between them worried Miles; you had to have a keen sense of humor to do sex and stay sane.

It must be quite a shock to suddenly find out you're pregnant, seventeen times over - at your age, too.

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

The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.

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

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.

This is important! But you have to stay absolutely cool. I may be completely off-base, and panicking prematurely."
"I don't think so. I think you're panicking post-maturely. In fact, if you were panicking any later it would be practically posthumously. I've been panicking for days.

We did it," he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. "Why didn't anybody stop us? Why aren't there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies?

You're worse than evil. You're inefficient.

Are you sure this isn't instant boots? asked Cordelia sadly, for in color, taste, and smell they closely resembled pulverized shoe leather pressed into wafers.

Cordelia faced one more climb onto that torture-device for humans and horses called a saddle.

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

Very good. But your most insidious chronic problem is in the area of . . . how shall I put this precisely . . . subordination. You argue too much." "No, I don't," Miles began indignantly, then shut his mouth.

I had never had a direct experience of the holy in my life, for all that I tried to serve my god as seemed best to me, according to my gifts as we are taught. Except for Hallana. She was the only miracle that ever happened to me. The woman seems vastly oversupplied with gods. At one point, I accused her of having stolen my share, and she accused me of marrying her solely to sustain a proper average. The gods walk through her dreams as though strolling in a garden. I just have dreams of running lost through my old seminary, with no clothes, late for an examination of a class I did not know I had, and the like.

Miles paused at the door. "Ah - about Tav Calhoun - " "Yes?" "You know that janitor's closet on the second level?" "Vaguely." She looked at him in unease. "Please be sure somebody checks it tomorrow morning. But don't go up there before then." "I wouldn't dream of it," she assured him faintly.

To use the machineries of justice to commit injustice is the deepest offense to the Father of Winter." He

When I was a wee little kid," remarked Roic, watching over their shoulders, "there was a time I thought that any skinny old man I saw was my grandfather. It was pretty confusing.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity.

So what's the test?"
"Ah, that's the trick of it. It's not a test. It's real life.

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That's the spirit! Forward momentum."
Mayhew snorted. "Your forward momentum is going to lead all your followers over a cliff someday." He paused, beginning to grin. "On the way down, you'll convince 'em all they can fly." He stuck his fists in his armpits, and waggled his elbows. "Lead on, my lord. I'm flapping as hard as I can.

That civet-jasmine blend you're wearing tonight absolutely clashes with the third-level formal style of your dress, you know.

The door was locked. The control had been buggered. Miles ripped it apart, shorted it out, and heaved the door open manually, nearly snapping his splayed fingers. She lay in a tumbled heap, too pale and still. Miles fell to his knees beside her. Throat pulse, throat pulse - there was one. Her skin was warm, her chest rose and fell. Stunned, only stunned. Only stunned. He looked up at a blurred Ivan hovering anxiously, swallowed, and steadied his ragged breathing. It had, after all, been the most logical possibility.

Leo will be coming with us," Emma offered, trying to sound optimistic. "He's a downsider." "I'm not sure that's exactly his field of expertise," said Claire honestly, trying to picture Leo as a medtech. He didn't care for hydraulic systems, he'd said.

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

All true wealth is biological (Aral Vorkosigan)

Actually, the full bell curve goes: brilliant; pretty good; mediocre; mediocre and interminable; dire; vile; dire and vile; and dire, vile, and interminable.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

I mean," Rosalie went on in a tone of renewed encouragement, "here's Vormoncrief, for instance." "Here is not Vormoncrief," Ekaterin said firmly, grasping for the one certain anchor in this whirlwind of confusion. "Absolutely not. You've never met the man, Rosalie, but take it from me, he's a twittering idiot. Aunt Vorthys, am I right or not?" The Professora smiled fondly at her. "I would not put it so bluntly, dear, but really, Rosalie, shall we say, I think Ekaterin can do better. There's plenty of time yet." "Do you think so?" Rosalie took in this assurance

Vormurtos leaned on the frame with his arms crossed, and failed to move aside.

At Miles's polite, "Excuse us, please," Vormurtos pursed his lips in exaggerated irony.

"Why not? Everyone else has. It seems if you are Vorkosigan enough, you can even get away with murder."

Ekaterin stiffened unhappily. Miles hesitated a fractional moment, considering responses: explanation, outrage, protest? Argument in a hallway with a half-potted fool? No. I am Aral Vorkosigan's son, after all. Instead, he stared up unblinkingly, and breathed, "So if you truly believe that, why are you standing in my way?"

Vormurtos's inebriated sneer drained away, to be replaced by a belated wariness. With an effort at insouciance that he did not quite bring off, he unfolded himself, and opened his hand to wave the couple past. When Miles bared his teeth in an edged smile, he backed up an extra and involuntary step. Miles shifted Ekaterin to his other side and strode past without looking back.

Ekaterin glanced over her shoulder once, as they made their way down the corridor. In a tone of dispassionate observation, she murmured, "He's melted. You know, your sense of humor is going to get you into deep trouble someday."

"Belike," Miles sighed.

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

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.

He didn't think he was edging into dementia. He suspected he was edging into sanity, the long way around. The hard way.

Dr. Yei," Bannerji objected, "if you're trying to knock a man out you've got to hit him a lot harder than that." Yei recoiled fearfully as Van Atta surged up out of his seat. "I didn't want to risk killing him . . ." "Why not?" muttered Bannerji under his breath. Furiously,

Some men just aren't cut for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.

Emperors per se did not unnerve Miles ... Emperor Gregor had been raised along with Miles practically as his foster-brother; somewhere in the back of Miles's mind the term emperor was coupled with such identifiers as somebody to play hide-and-seek with. In this context those hidden assumptions could be a psychosocial land mine.

She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. "What do we do with this?"
Dag sat cross-legged and smiled
not much of a smile, but a start. "Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It's very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever.

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.

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.

Royse Bergon: "I've seen your integrity in action. It ... widened my world. I'd been raised by my father, who is a prudent, cautious man, always looking for men's hidden, selfish motivations. No one can cheat him. But I've seen him cheat himself. If you understand what I mean."
Caz: "Yes."
R.B.: "It was very foolish of you to attack that vile Roknari galley-man."
Caz: "Yes."
R.B.: "And yet, I think, given the same circumstances you would do it again."
Caz: "Knowing what I know now ... it would be harder. But I would hope ... I would pray, Royse, that the gods would still lend me such foolishness in my need."
R.B: "What is this astonishing foolishness, that shines brighter than all my father's gold? Can you teach me to be such a fool, too, Caz?"
Caz: "Oh," "I'm sure of it.

A Caligula, or a Yuri Vorbarra, can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.

Ability promoted regardless of background.

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

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

Cordelia shook her head helplessly. "You would. A vote. Right." She buried her face in her hands a moment, and sobbed a laugh. "Why?" she asked through her fingers.

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.

... the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.

What is love but delight in another human being? He delights me daily.