Lois McMaster Bujold

“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.”

“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.”

“In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.”

“It’s true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.""Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight.""That’s not insight. That’s a personal guarantee.”

“I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.”

“The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.”

“Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time--these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.”

“A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman's breasts and cry—even if he is at a convenient height for it.”

“At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.”

“The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.”

“Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.”

“And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.”

“Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.”

“You were kind.”Cazaril shrugged. “Why not? What could it cost me, after all?”Bergon shook his head. “Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I’d always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hear”

“What you are is a question only you can answer.”

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.”

“Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there....”

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”

“But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man.”

“Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don't make children--children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too”