Top 300 Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That’s soul-destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

52. “You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

53. “All true wealth is biological.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

54. “Not that I haven’t leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It’s sustaining the altitude that defeats me.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

55. “You have to be careful who you let define your good.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

56. “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.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

57. “If you make it plain you like people, it’s hard for them to resist liking you back.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

58. “Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

60. “The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

62. “Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

63. “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.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

64. “Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

65. “A Caligula, or a Yuri Vorbarra, can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

66. “I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

67. “Some men just aren’t cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

68. “I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique – ‘What’s the worst possible thing I can do to these people?’”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

69. “A hundred objective measurements didn’t sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

70. “If you can’t do what you want, do what you can.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

71. “Who am I, when I am not surrounded by the walls of my life? When they have all fallen into dust and rubble?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

72. “Quite the reverse, since innocence based in ignorance was unfit to protect itself.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

73. “The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

74. “Then she said, “You go on. You just go on. There’s nothing more to it, and there’s no trick to make it easier. You just go on.” “What do you find on the other side? When you go on?” She shrugged. “Your life again. What else?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

75. “Miles added it to his life’s lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

76. “I take it as a man’s duty to restrain himself.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

77. “Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

78. “Must retire harder...”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

79. “It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart’s hope. It was what I wanted to be.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

80. “There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

81. “Hi, I’m a hero, but I can’t tell you why. It’s classified.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

82. “One learns better than to hand one’s choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

83. “Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,′ said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

84. “From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you’re a writer you never know what’s going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

85. “You try to give away what you want yourself.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

86. “You want to be good. All right, I can understand that. But you have to be careful who you let define your good.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

87. “Any communitys 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.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

88. “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 ease before his own hearth.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

89. “The world is made by the people who show up for the job.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

90. “To a man of certain age... all young ladies start to look delightful. It’s the first symptom of senility.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

91. “I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

92. “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.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

93. “It indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one’s own discomfort for a benefit to another.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

94. “Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

95. “For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

96. “Hey, let’s try speed-starting the fire with an infusion of pure oxygen!” Because inside every senior tech officer was a junior tech officer who’d been on a short leash for a long time.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

97. “Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

98. “Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

99. “If there’s no game, isn’t winning a pretty meaningless concept?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

100. “The will to be stupid is a very powerful force –.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold