Top 300 Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Truth is always War’s first victim, the old saying went.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

102. “The man who assumes everything is a lie is at least as mistaken as the one who assumes everything is true.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

103. “It is imperfect. So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

104. “I guess it just doesn’t look very heroic to sneak up behind somebody and shoot them in the back. I can’t help thinking it would be more efficient, though.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

105. “Talking to the gods had been a much more comfortable proposition when there had seemed no danger of Their talking back.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

106. “Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

107. “And that was just how it worked, wasn’t it? Happiness handed around and around, never stopping. It wasn’t something one could hoard tight like a miser. That would be like trying to hold one’s breath for later.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

108. “Some attitudes couldn’t be changed, they just had to be outlived.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

109. “Well, one couldn’t help one’s thoughts. One could help opening one’s mouth and saying something really stupid, though.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

110. “Miles, when he was contemplating this technology for my future grandchildren, wanted to start twelve at once and do them all in one efficient batch. Like growing his own platoon, I gather. I offered to take turns with Ekaterin holding his head under water till he had a better idea, but as it turned out, she didn’t need my help. Wonderful girl, my daughter-in-law. I still don’t know what he did to deserve her.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

111. “Read, or you will be missing something extraordinary.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

112. “It’s never too late while you’re breathing.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

113. “I’d have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

114. “How fortunate that science hasn’t cracked human immortality. It’s a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

115. “The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader’s mind. It’s a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. The words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when someone reads it. – Sidelines.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

116. “I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next that counts most.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

117. “I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

118. “Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

119. “The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present – they are real.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

120. “His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman’s hands. Or maybe she hadn’t been patient. Maybe she’d been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

121. “Her smile grew bitter as desert brine. “The gods may forgive Ista all day long. But if Ista does not forgive Ista, the gods may go hang themselves.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

122. “Another day will put some other plate on your table, more to your taste, but do not waste the food in front of you.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

123. “She considered the familiar conundrum inherent in complimenting a child for doing something well in the course of what ought not to have been done at all, and kept her peace.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

124. “It could be surprisingly hard to counter Plain Stupid. Even by heroic measures.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

125. “Something I did not know at twenty,” said Nikys slowly, “that I do know at thirty, is that when a woman marries a man, she marries his life. And it had better be the life she wants to lead.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

127. “Save me from that! To pour your life into sons for eighteen or twenty years, and then have the government take them away and waste them cleaning up after some failure of politics – no thanks.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

128. “People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

129. “Trust in the gods, They will supply? Hardly. He wondered suddenly if it was as hard for the gods to have faith in Ingrey as it was for him to have faith in Them, and a weird wild urge to show Them how it should be done swept him for a moment.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

130. “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

131. “Hold to virtue – if you can identify it – and trust that the duty set before you is the duty desired of you. And that the talents given to you are the talents you should place in the gods’ service. Believe that the gods ask for nothing back that they have not first lent to you. Not even your life.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

132. “You looked a god in the eyes and bore witness for me, by which alone I am preserved.” She took a deep breath, through his mouth. “You looked a god in the eyes. And spoke for me. There is nothing in my power that I will ever refuse you, after that.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

133. “Well, I don’t hate him. Can’t say as I worship him, either.” She paused a long time, and looked up to meet her mother’s eyes square on. “But when he’s cut, I bleed.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

134. “His further study of humanity had revealed just how much people could convince themselves that their own needs were those of the gods, and not the other way around.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

135. “Divide the infinite future into five-minute blocks, and take them one by one.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

136. “I’m sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

137. “I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

138. “We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn’t even know it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

139. “So the unknown breeds dragons in map margins, she reflected...”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

140. “So in the physics of the heart, distance is relative; it’s time that’s absolute.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

141. “Let me help. Rhymes with I love you, right?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

142. “The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

143. “Wikipedia is so dangerous.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

144. “Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

145. “One corner of his mouth crooked up, then the quirk vanished in a thoughtful pursing of his lips. “He’s bisexual, you know.” He took a delicate sip of his wine. “Was bisexual,” she corrected absently, looking fondly across the room. “Now he’s monogamous.” Vordarian choked, sputtering.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

146. “What’s in the box? Not a severed head – again – I trust?” It seemed too small for that, fortunately. Cordelia’s gray eyes glinted. “Now, now, Oliver. Bring home one dismembered body part, once, mind you, once, and people get twitchy about checking your luggage ever after.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

147. “Well, he’s his god’s problem now. Don’t promote your troubles beyond your rank.” “That is actually theologically sound advice.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

148. “When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, “He didn’t hit me.””

— Lois McMaster Bujold

149. “It was Ivan’s morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

150. “I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold