Lois McMaster Bujold (b. 1949)

Quotes

• ...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.

• This sheaf of paper with gaudy cover glued to the spine is not the book. The book is not an object on the table, it is an event in the readers mind.... The book, therefore is only finished when someone reads it.

• All true wealth is biological.

• The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

• By their essential nature triumphs can't be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can't be gifts.

• 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.

• When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.

• I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.

• If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.

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

• 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.

• Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.

• An honor is not diminished for being shared.

• Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

• My home is not a place, it is people.

• Our children change us... whether they live or not.

• Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.

• Any community's 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.

• 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?

• Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win.