Lois McMaster Bujold
American author of science fiction and fantasy works, most noted for the works in her Vorkosigan Saga.
In my experience, milady, we can never get back to exactly where we started, no matter how hard we try.
Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and materials to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival — to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory — organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.
One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.
Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees — M.S., M.D., Ph.D...
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.
Strange mercies, Illyan. You kill me so courteously.
Total strangers trying to kill me make me feel right at home.
It just happens to be very important to me to win with the hand I was dealt.
Marta blinked at him with manufactured innocence. "Kareen had it from Mark. I had it from Ivan. Mama had it from Gregor. And Da had it from Pym. If you're trying to keep it a secret, Miles, why are you going around telling everyone"?
I don’t write stories to tell readers what to think, or even tell them what I think; I write stories to show me what I think. Writing is always a journey of discovery that way, as suspenseful for me as I hope it will be for the audience.
Your "accidents," I once noticed, have ways of entangling your enemies that are the green envy of mature and careful strategists. Far too consistent for chance, I concluded it had to be unconscious will.
I was never a mercenary, not ever. Not for one single minute.
If we shouldn't do it, we shouldn't be able to do it.
You can't give power away and keep it simultaneously. Except posthumously.
The joys of command — well, you know. You taught them to me. One part glory to ten parts shoveling manure.
God's not here. Somebody's got to fill in.
Mother Nature gives a sense of romance to young people, in place of prudence, to advance the species. It's a trick—that makes us grow.
A skilled soldier kills your enemies, but a skilled duelist kills your allies.
Was this the trick of it? Secrets so dire as to be unspeakable, thoughts so frightening as to make clear young voices mute, kicked out into the open with blunt ironic humor. And suddenly the dire didn't loom so darkly any more, and fear shrank, and anyone could say anything. And the unbearable seemed a little easier to lift.
If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.