Quotes from Lois McMaster Bujold

I've always thought 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.

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

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

You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.

Aim high. You may still miss the target but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.

The old customs are dead, and we keep trying on new ones, like badly fitting clothes.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic.

Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.

Any community's arm of force--military, police, security--needs people in it who can do the 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.

Be careful who you pretend to be. You might become it.

The facts appear to be mutating every forty minutes. Like bacteria.

And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course.

God's not here. Somebody's got to fill in.

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Seems like half my anxiety dreams are about airports.

I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.

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.

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.

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do neccesary 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.

Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

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.