Quotes from 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.

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.

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

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

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.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

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.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

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.

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.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

My home is not a place, it is people.

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

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

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

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

I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

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

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.

When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

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