American speculative fiction writer (1949- )
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.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Author's Afterword, Cordelia's Honor
I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Author's Afterword, Young Miles
Any community's arm of force--military, police, security--needs people in it who can do the 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.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Barrayer
The old customs are dead, and we keep trying on new ones, like badly fitting clothes.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Shards of Honor
Aim high. You may still miss the target but at least you won't shoot your foot off.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Komarr
But pain ... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Barrayer
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Memory
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Barrayer
Be careful who you pretend to be. You might become it.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Mirror Dance
Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Shards of Honor
Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees--M.S., M.D., Ph.D...
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Falling Free
She took the story in like some strange, spiked gift, too fragile to drop, too painful to hold.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Shards of Honor
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
A Civil Campaign
Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Komarr
The facts appear to be mutating every forty minutes. Like bacteria.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
The Vor Game
A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
The Vor Game
You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Barrayer
God's not here. Somebody's got to fill in.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Falling Free
The last thing a monster wanted was a fellow to follow him around all day long with a mirror.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Memory
And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Falling Free