Lois McMaster Bujold quotes

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. (Lois McMaster Bujold)
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
Lois McMaster Bujold
What you are is a question only you can answer.
Lois McMaster Bujold
If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?
Lois McMaster Bujold
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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.
Lois McMaster Bujold
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
Lois McMaster Bujold
An honor is not diminished for being shared.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. (Lois McMaster Bujold)
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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
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.
Lois McMaster Bujold
You have to be careful who you let define your good.
Lois McMaster Bujold
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
Lois McMaster Bujold
My home is not a place, it is people.
Lois McMaster Bujold
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?
Lois McMaster Bujold
It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.
Lois McMaster Bujold
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
Lois McMaster Bujold
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? (Lois McMaster Bujold)
If you can't do what you want, do what you can.
Lois McMaster Bujold
If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.
Lois McMaster Bujold
If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?
Lois McMaster Bujold
Our children change us...whether they live or not.
Lois McMaster Bujold