Lois McMaster Bujold
American author of science fiction and fantasy works, most noted for the works in her Vorkosigan Saga.
Marriage was a lottery, and you drew your lot in late adolescence or early adulthood at a point of maximum idiocy and confusion.
Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind.
One scarcely knows if he would be of more use to us as a hostage, or set loose to be a very bad enemy leader.
You have a reputation as a bold Barrayaran barbarian—say that six times really fast—too dangerous to let loose.
Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.
No, no, never send interim reports. Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must either then obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem.
It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.
A good friend of my son's is a son to me.
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
Just because we're adults doesn't automatically mean we can save you...
Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.
Hunting hawks do not belong in cages, no matter how much a man covets their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They are far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.
I guess it just doesn't look very heroic to sneak up behind somebody and shoot them in the back. I can't help thinking it would be more efficient, though.
Most days it's just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.
Some fellows you have to hit with a brick to get their attention. Some you have to hit with a BIG brick.
She's just as bad as he is! God help me.
I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better — when you can get it.
If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?
East is west, up is down, and being falsely arrested for getting your C.O.'s throat cut is a simplification. I must be on Barrayar.