Lois McMaster Bujold
American author of science fiction and fantasy works, most noted for the works in her Vorkosigan Saga.
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.
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.
You have to be careful who you let define your good.
One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including — or perhaps especially — the failures.
It's not a comfortable thing, to be chosen so. I tried to avoid it for a long time, but God finds ways of dealing with draft dodgers.
Men may move mountains, but ideas move men.
Pain hurts, sir. I don't court it.
How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?
When the time came to leap in faith, whether you had your eyes open or closed or screamed all the way down or not made no practical difference.
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.
Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.
The apparently effortless fluidity of both style and story may actually have mitigated against critical notice, in comparison to notorious stylists like William Gibson, or, again, Ursula Le Guin. But, despite Bujold's space opera plots, the flashes of humour rare either in Le Guin or in SF as a whole, and the steady pigeonholing of her work as military SF, her similarities to Le Guin go far beyond the presence of that wall.
Firstly, both are consummate character-builders. Indeed, characterization, emphasis on character, and plots that depend on character and the novums of technology are among Bujold's strongpoints. Nowhere does this emerge more clearly than if her work is taken as military SF and compared to that of writers like Jerry Pournelle or David Weber.
You must kill if you expect to survive."
"No you don't," Miles put in. "Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.
Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.
The cream pie of justice flies one way.
I can't quit, once I've started. I've been told I'm pathologically persistent. I can't quit.
The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless — one ought to at least have to grunt for it.
One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.