Quotes from Lois McMaster Bujold

And what is your current complaint? I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts... It was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay. Fatigue, Cordelia managed at last.

T)he cadet was too young to believe in death after life.

It's never too late while you're breathing.

But though you'd never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you're going to fall like a starving man.

It is imperfect. So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.

In my experience, milady, we can never get back to exactly where we started, no matter how hard we try.

Sorry, Bill. I just have this awful vision of being p-peeled like an onion, looking for the seeds. He grinned. Onions don't have seeds, Cordelia. I stand corrected, she said dryly.

It indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one's own discomfort for a benefit to another.

You? I know you! You trust beyond reason. She met his eyes steadily. Yes. It's how I get results beyond hope. As you may recall.

Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat.

With an air of confession, Jin lowered his voice. Eggs come out of chickens' butts, you know.

There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you. I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you. - Miles Vorkosigan

And that was just how it worked, wasn't it? Happiness handed around and around, never stopping. It wasn't something one could hoard tight like a miser. That would be like trying to hold one's breath for later.

I seem to have accidentally got married, but it's only temporary.

everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location.

He didn't think he was edging into dementia. He suspected he was edging into sanity, the long way around. The hard way.

Let me help. Rhymes with I love you, right?

It was all sympathetic magic. When you couldn't do something truly useful, you tended to vent the pent-up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.... The friction tends to arise when the two are not the same....There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.

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.

You cannot outguess the gods. Hold to virtue—if you can identify it—and trust that the duty set before you is the duty desired of you. And that the talents given to you are the talents you should place in the gods' service. Believe that the gods ask for nothing back that they have not first lent to you. Not even your life.

God save me from another such victory.

people do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives.