Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

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

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.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

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

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.

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, a scientist, an artist, or an entrepreneur. In service of their goals, they lay down time, 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.

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.

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.

You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.

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

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

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

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without 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.

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?

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

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

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

He's not too short. He's just... concentrated.

Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

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.

Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.