Bujold, Lois McMaster (b. 1949), US science fiction author
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.
It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart’s hope. It was what I wanted to be.
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
Our children change us… whether they live or not.
If you want to catch something, running after it isn’t always the best way.
I don’t confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement.
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honour is what you know about yourself.
If you can’t do what you want, do what you can.
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We’re not giving up. We’re waiting for a better opportunity to win.
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.
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.
Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
Experience suggests it doesn’t matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.
Adversity does teach who your real friends are.
My home is not a place, it is people.
An honour is not diminished for being shared.
What you are is a question only you can answer.
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
If you make it plain you like people, it’s hard for them to resist liking you back.
Some men just aren’t cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.
Any community’s arm of force – military, police, security – needs people in it who can do 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.
If power was an illusion, wasn’t weakness necessarily one also?
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.
You couldn’t be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you’d been abused into affecting public humility.
I take it as a man’s duty to restrain himself.
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they’ll be called on to do before the next chance.
It’s important that someone celebrate our existence… People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.
If you’re trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it’s a lot easier to hit your targets if you don’t yell going through the door.
But pain… seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
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.
If the truth doesn’t save us, what does that say about us?
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 weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
