Lois McMaster Bujold
The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.Collection: Death
When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.
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.
What you are is a question only you can answer.
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
I'm very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.
I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.
For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.
Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.
Wikipedia is so dangerous.
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.Collection: Inspirational
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.Collection: Success
I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Desire
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.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Perfect
Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Mean
If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.Collection: 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.Collection: Athlete
Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.Collection: Light
Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Important
Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.Collection: Feet
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.Collection: Growing Up
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.Collection: Love
Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.Collection: Momentum
If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Genius
He's not too short. He's just... concentrated.Collection: Too Short
The world is made by the people who show up for the job.Collection: Jobs
Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.Collection: Achieve
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?Collection: Pain
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.Collection: Action
Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.Collection: Reality
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.Collection: Victory
Your father calls you to his court. You need not pack. You go garbed in glorious raiment. He waits eagerly by his palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at the high table, by his side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved.Collection: Love
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.Collection: Love
If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.Collection: Running
One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.Collection: Time
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?Collection: Men
Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.Collection: People
Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.Collection: Stupid
One foot in front of the other, wasn't that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.Collection: Feet
Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.Collection: Real
As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favorCollection: Technique
The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.Collection: Giving