Lois McMaster Bujold · 367 pages
Rating: (11.3K votes)
“We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“We did it," he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. "Why didn't anybody stop us? Why aren't there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“I always thought my parents could fix anything. Now it's my turn. Dear God, how did this happen?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“to slide halfway to stupid and stop was rare indeed.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it, just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Are we not all called on to yield our children back to the world, in the end?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Military intelligence was as nothing to military stupidity.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“To Komarr, my lord? Or Sergyar?” “No. Calculate the shortest possible jump route directly to Rho Ceta.” Vorpatril’s head jerked back in startlement. “If the orders I received from Sector Five HQ mean what we think, you’ll hardly get passage there. Reception by plasma fire and fusion shells the moment you pop out of the wormhole would be what I’d expect.” “Unpack, Miles,” Ekaterin’s voice drifted in. He grinned briefly at the familiar exasperation in her voice. “By the time we arrive there, I will have arranged our clearances with the Cetagandan Empire.” I hope. Or else they were all going to be in more trouble than Miles ever wanted to imagine. “Barrayar is bringing their kidnapped haut babies back to them. On the end of a long stick. I get to be the stick.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Right.” Roic nodded. He glanced over Miles’s growing array of medical attachments. “By the way, m’lord. Had you happened to mention your seizure disorder to the surgeon yet?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“And . . . it would be a real relief for me to have someone along I can talk to freely.” Her smile tilted a little at this. “Talk, or vent?” “I—hem!—suspect this one is going to entail quite a lot of venting, yes. D’you think you can stand it?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Miles bowed, sitting; his floater bobbed slightly. “My horse would like you fine. He’s extremely amiable, not to mention much too old and lazy to stampede anywhere. And I personally guarantee that with a Vorkosigan liveried armsman at your back, not the most benighted backcountry hick would offer you insult.” Roic,”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Send a patroller to check,” said Miles a little tightly. Remembering he was supposed to be a diplomat, he added, “If you please.” Teris”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“I’ll bet. I . . .” He couldn’t say it, not so baldly. He dodged, while he mustered courage. “I promised to call Nicol when I had news of Bel, and I haven’t had a chance. The news, as you may know, is not good; we found Bel, but the herm has been deliberately infected with a bioengineered Cetagandan parasite that may . . . may prove lethal.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“The second ward was declared a temporary holding cell for their prisoner, the ba, who followed in the procession, bound to a float pallet. Miles scowled as the pallet drifted past, towed on its control lead by a watchful, muscular sergeant.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“But the herm was gray-faced, lips purple-blue, eyelids fluttering. An IV pump, not dependent upon potentially erratic ship’s gravity, infused yellow fluid rapidly into Bel’s right arm. The left arm was strapped to a board; plastic tubing filled with blood ran from under a bandage and into a hybrid appliance bound around with quantities of plastic tape. A second tube ran back again, its dark surface moist with condensation.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be able to handle Garnet Five. Just be your usual charming self.” Ekaterin’s vision of him, he reminded himself, was not exactly objective. Thank God. “I’ve been trying to charm quaddies all day, with no noticeable success.” “If you make it plain you like people, it’s hard for them to resist liking you back. And Nicol will be playing in the orchestra tonight.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Hän hymähti pari kertaa katkerasti, ei niinkään paljon valtiollisesta vihasta kuin sen vuoksi, että hänen kengässään oli hiekkaa, eikä hän voinut jäädä poistamaan sitä, koska olisi jäänyt toisista liian kauas.”
― Väinö Linna, quote from The Unknown Soldier
“And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than in that moment, because at that moment she had become himself.
But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, not what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you. [...]
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognises in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can expose his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb.
And the only way he had ever found, the only code, the only language by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else's streets when it would rather stay home and sleep, she would understand it then.
But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped out. All you got is two bottles, one nearly full, one nearly empty.”
― James Jones, quote from From Here to Eternity
“#41: SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPY. CATS TAKE NAPS SO THEY’RE ALWAYS READY FOR ANYTHING.”
― quote from The Paladin Prophecy
“There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from The Woodlanders
“There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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