Lois McMaster Bujold on Life

"Life’s uncertain out there. Things can go down bad, fast, anytime. We all just get a time, in our different ways."

"“The best strategies run on rails like that.” Miles pointed out. “Live or die, you make your goal."

"Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees—M.S., M.D., Ph.D..."

"How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?"

"Right or wrong, what I also saw was that you made an enemy, and left him alive behind you. Great charity. Bad tactics."

"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."

"No fear trembled his voice. Well, she reflected, perhaps he was not old enough yet to have really come to believe in death after life."

"You can’t just…ignore them out of existence though apparently that’s exactly what you’ve been attempting."

"To kill a man, it helps if you can first take away his face. A neat mental trick. Handy for a soldier."

"The entire center of her life was a blackened waste, its long years not to be recovered nor replaced."

"A mercenary who can’t honor his contract when it’s rough as well as smooth is a thug, not a soldier."

"Life with women did not just induce strange behavior, it appeared; it induced very strange behavior."

"I for one find a casual destruction of a man's life even more repugnant than a determined one."

"My brother has this bad little habit of editing his version of reality to fit his audience."

"Self-sedation seemed to require more alcohol than it used to, a problem easily remedied."

"I don’t think I’m destined to die today. I must be being saved for day after tomorrow."

"Love was long gone, in her. She got by on a starvation diet of loyalty these days."

"GalacTech’s not God, Claire. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your firstborn to it."

"Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you."

"They hesitated. Ah, the downside of perfect obedience: crippled initiative."

"Government by thugs in the Bloody Centuries gave Barrayar many colorful historical incidents, suitable for high drama. I don’t think it’s a drama we wish to return to in real life."

"You can tell you’re alive when somebody touches you back."

"This isn’t a class. This is real life."

"It’s...a transcendental act. Making life. I thought about that when I was carrying Miles. “By this act, I bring one death into the world.” One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between."

"I would be considerably more impressed with your god, dy Cabon," said Ista through her teeth, "if He could have arranged one life's worth of simple protection in advance, rather than three hundred lives' worth of gaudy vengeance afterward."

"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."

"Suicide wasn’t an option for me anymore, I found. Not like good old adolescent angst. I’m no longer of the secret opinion that death will somehow overlook me if I don’t do something personally about it. And give life…it seems stupid not to make the most of what I do have. Not to mention deucedly ungrateful."

"The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised."

"I suppose my determination to be a soldier stems from that date. I mean the real thing, not the parades and the uniforms and the glamour, but the logistics, the offensive advantage, the speed and surprise—the power. A better-prepared, stronger, tougher, faster, meaner son-of-a-bitch than any who came through that door."

"S funny. Piotr, toward the end of his life, looked at our district and only saw how much better it was. All the backbreaking, heartbreaking work he did cleaning up the messes after the war is taken for granted now, or mostly just forgotten. Instead, we look around and only see how much better it could be. And neither of us is wrong, exactly."