Quotes from Lois McMaster Bujold

Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)

slowing—"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. In darkness, understanding." He

A price is something you get. A cost is something you lose.

Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination.

the key was to take the initiative from the first moment, and keep it thereafter. He could be as hollow as a drum, so long as he was as loud.

he'd looked as tall and cool as ever, but a faint panicked light in his blue eyes had put her oddly in mind of a cat that had just had an inadvertent ride in a dryer.

The gods do not save us from death.  They only catch us when we fall from life.

It's so obviously bogus, no one will look for a second layer of, er, bogusity.

All her old thoughts seemed as thin and ragged as a piece of knitting made and ripped out and made and ripped out again until all the threads were frayed, growing ever more worn, but never larger.

The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.

Guards, Miles now realized, had to stay in prison all day long too. Indeed, as a guard, one of his jobs was now to keep himself in.

The Son held up his hands. Luminescent, they seemed, as if dappled by autumn sun reflecting off a stream into shade. "My grace flows from these as a river, wolf-lord. Would you have me dole it out in the exact measure that men earn, as from an apothecary's dropper? Would you stand in pure water to your waist, and administer it by the scant spoon to men dying of thirst on a parched shore?

Just once, Pen thought glumly, he'd like to get an answer to prayers, instead of being delivered as one.

So you're saying that I could die at any moment!" "Yes. And this is different from your life yesterday in what way?" Umegat cocked his head in dry inquiry.

She inhaled the complex odors, from vegetation, water vapor, industrial waste gases. Barrayar permitted an amazing amount of air dumping, as if . . . well, air was free, here. Nobody measured it; there were no air processing and filtration fees. Did these people even realize how rich they were? All the air they could breathe, just by stepping outdoors, taken for granted as casually as they took frozen water falling from the sky.

Are you sure this isn't instant boots? asked Cordelia sadly, for in color, taste, and smell they closely resembled pulverized shoe leather pressed into wafers.

I'd have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it.

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.

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

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

Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge.

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.

I believe, she said slowly at last, that the tormented are very close to God. I'm sorry, Sergeant. He

How could you argue sense into someone who believed something not because it was true, but because he was an idiot?