Lois McMaster Bujold
American author of science fiction and fantasy works, most noted for the works in her Vorkosigan Saga.
We don't just march on the future, we charge it.
Mine is not a theology of the elect. I intend to preach to the masses. Even the sinners.
I am a much better person and a better writer having had my children than I would be otherwise. I would have missed a whole aspect of the human experience that's tremendously fundamental to things like characterization.
A lot of writers write as if the hero sort of popped out of the box at age 22 fully formed. And one thing that raising children does is give you some sense of how human beings really are put together. So when you go to put together a character you can have a more realistic sense of where people really come from, why they really behave the way they do and what a tremendous amount of life and complexity lies behind every human being.
But I think you can get that from being a father too. I think it's something you can do by growing up and being observant even if you don't have children.
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.
When you can't get what you want, you take what you can get.
His heart still seemed to ache, the way an overstrained muscle twinged when one put weight on it. Like muscle strain, it would pass with a little rest, he suspected.
Luck is something you make for yourself, if you want it.
Don't be afraid. The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.
It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
Acting or reacting, we carry him in us. You can't walk away from him any more than I can. Whether you travel toward or away, he'll be the compass. He'll be the glass, full of subtle colors and astigmatisms, through which all new things will be viewed. I too have a father who haunts me, and I know.
"Such a perilous concentration of demons would create chaos all around it."
"War gathers on these borders," said Ista. "A greater concentration of chaos I can hardly imagine."
Cynicism did not seem nearly so impressively daring to her now as it had when she was twenty.
"The gods would take him and leave me bereft, and I curse them!"
"I have cursed them for years," said Ista dryly. "Turnabout being fair."
Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.
Our children change us…whether they live or not.
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.
You're so hopelessly monosexual, Miles.