Lois McMaster Bujold
513 quotes
Biography
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."
"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."
"Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible."
"Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods.""Do you?""I believe they are not here, yes. It's a faith of sorts."
"All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and 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. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again."
"I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better — when you can get it."
"Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal."
"I cannot emphasize enough that I do not start with a plan or agenda and mechanically manipulate characters and events to carry it out. I set characters in motion, and let them teach me what the book is."
"There’s an awful a lot of gaming of the list that goes on in book promotion, where you try to make everybody aware of your book at the same time, try to get them to buy it, get it noticed, get it visible. Which is kind of the opposite of the way I’ve written. I’ve not written bestsellers, I’ve written evergreens. Every book I’ve ever written is still in print."
"Writing is a very redemptive profession, because all of your mistakes can be reclassified as raw material. ... All those things that went awry become material and become more manageable, psychologically and otherwise. ... My five years I spent wandering around in college and left without a degree (to my parents' dismay) — all turned out to be useful to my career ..."
"On the sixth day God saw He couldn’t do it all, it read, so He created engineers."
"Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal. That’s all."
"Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees—M.S., M.D., Ph.D..."
"Of all the times to pick for this outbreak of idiocy, this has gotta be the worst possible. It’s got to be deliberate. Nothing this fouled up could be by chance."
"The line of logic trailed off in confusion; he turned his thoughts impatiently from it. Mental wheel-spinning, as unproductive as philosophy class in college."
"I don’t know whose judgement is worse, yours or the jerk’s who hired you—"
"Claire, listen to me. The proper response to Bruce isn’t suicide, it’s murder."
"GalacTech’s not God, Claire. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your firstborn to it."
"There are weapons all around us here, we just don’t recognize them because we call them “tools.”"
"Even soldiers in battle have to be brought to a special state of mental excitement to shoot total strangers."
"This isn’t a class. This is real life."
"God’s not here. Somebody’s got to fill in."
"The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised."
"“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things.”"