Lois McMaster Bujold (b. 1949)

Quotes

• You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

• Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

• You have to be careful who you let define your good.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear.

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

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

• Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.

• A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.

• A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.

• If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?