...tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Adversity does teach who your real friends are. - 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
Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there.... - Lois McMaster Bujold
You try to give away what you want yourself. - Lois McMaster Bujold
The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives. - Lois McMaster Bujold
You have to be careful who you let define your good. - Lois McMaster Bujold
The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later. - Lois McMaster Bujold
And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth? - Lois McMaster Bujold
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished. - Lois McMaster Bujold
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it. - Lois McMaster Bujold
It's important that someone celebrate our existence... 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
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them. - Lois McMaster Bujold
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
Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. - 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
What you are is a question only you can answer. - Lois McMaster Bujold
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something. - Lois McMaster Bujold
This sheaf of paper with gaudy cover glued to the spine is not the book. The book is not an object on the table, it is an event in the readers mind.... The book, therefore is only finished when someone reads it. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Our children change us... whether they live or not. - Lois McMaster Bujold
I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself. - 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
If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also? - 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
Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it. - Lois McMaster Bujold
If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us? - Lois McMaster Bujold
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win. - Lois McMaster Bujold
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
A good friend of my son's is a son to me. - Lois McMaster Bujold
All true wealth is biological. - Lois McMaster Bujold
My home is not a place, it is people. - Lois McMaster Bujold
If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way. - 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
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. - 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
It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive. - 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
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back. - Lois McMaster Bujold
If you can't do what you want, do what you can. - Lois McMaster Bujold
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear. - Lois McMaster Bujold
You must learn to give, from sufficiency, not only take, from neediness. - Lois McMaster Bujold
A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Any community's 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
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
An honor is not diminished for being shared. - Lois McMaster Bujold
By their essential nature triumphs can't be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can't be gifts. - Lois McMaster Bujold
When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy. - 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
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all. - Lois McMaster Bujold
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days. - Lois McMaster Bujold
Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal. - Lois McMaster Bujold