Lois McMaster Bujold

Writer

1949-11-02

Quotes by Lois McMaster Bujold

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

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• And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

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• 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

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• Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

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• Don't let fear swallow all your happiness. Don't forget to take joy. Dag gulped. Both of their grounds were nearly closed. It was Arkady's voice alone that hinted how hard-bought this bit of wisdom might've been, yet the words had been nearly toneless.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

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• But though you'd never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall— when you fall, you're going to fall like a starving man.

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• (Watching her) was a little like watching water lilies; rather more like smelling a dinner he was not allowed to eat. Was it possible to be starved for so long as to forget the taste of food, for the pangs of hunger to burn out like ash? It seemed so. But both the pleasure and the pain were his heart's secret, here. He was put in mind, suddenly, of the soil at the edge of a recovering blight; the weedy bedraggled look of it, unlovely yet hopeful. Blight was a numb gray thing, without sensation. Did the return of green life hurt? Odd thought.

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

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• 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.

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• At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.

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• I'm afraid even ImpSec has no explanation for women's tastes in men.

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• 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.

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• Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)

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• Women shouldn't be in combat, said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. Neither should men, in my opinion.

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• In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today's physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.

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• 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.

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