Quotes from Lois McMaster Bujold

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

It's not that I'm not upset; it's just that I'm too tired to run up and down the corridor screaming.

Women shouldn't be in combat, said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. Neither should men, in my opinion.

I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can't be given.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself... Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

Think of the glory. Think of your reputation. Think how great it'll look on your next resume. On my cenotaph, you mean. Nobody will be able to collect enough of my scattered atoms to bury. You going to cover my funeral expenses, son? Splendidly. Banners, dancing girls, and enough beer to float your coffin to Valhalla. - Miles coaxing Ky Tung to agree to an almost suicidal mission

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 his ease before his own hearth.' 'Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how they may endure.' -Bergon and Cazaril talking over the past

Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

Miles is... Miles; close to a force of nature, climbing up out of his own pages and escaping subordination to any opinion of mine.

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

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.

And this was your friend? Cordelia raised her eyebrows. Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.

The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.

Stand before his grave and use your gift of breath to complain of your limited time. If you dare.

It reminded him of that definition of his father's. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground; the stuff in between was just noise.

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.

A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman's breasts and cry—even if he is at a convenient height for it.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

Well, one couldn't help one's thoughts. One could help opening one's mouth and saying something really stupid, though.

One foot in front of the other, wasn't that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.