Lois McMaster Bujold · 496 pages
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“Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods.
Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“I'd storm heaven for you, if I knew where it was.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.'
'Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how they may endure.'
-Bergon and Cazaril talking over the past”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“So you’re saying that I could die at any moment!” “Yes. And this is different from your life yesterday in what way?”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“It wasn't a case of storming heaven. It was a case of letting heaven storm you.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Take heart, sir," Cazaril consoled him. "It is not your destiny today to win a royacy for your son. It is to win an empire for your grandson.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Not all prisons are made of iron bars, some are made of feather beds.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“You cannot outguess the gods. Hold to virtue—if you can identify it—and trust that the duty set before you is the duty desired of you. And that the talents given to you are the talents you should place in the gods’ service. Believe that the gods ask for nothing back that they have not first lent to you. Not even your life.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“We have what we can hold, dear boy, and never let them see you flinch or falter.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“Your divine should not have used water. It just doesn't hold the attention properly. Wine. Or blood, in a pinch. Some liquid that matters.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“To a man of certain age... all young ladies start to look delightful. It's the first symptom of senility.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs. If you are become their tool, it is for a greater reason, an urgent reason. But you are the tool. You are not the work.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He—or she—freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“I have had another thought on such fates that denies neither gods nor man. Perhaps, instead of controlling every step, the gods have started a hundred or a thousand Cazarils and Umegats down this road, and only those arrive who choose to.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
“the key was to take the initiative from the first moment, and keep it thereafter. He could be as hollow as a drum, so long as he was as loud.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from The Curse of Chalion
Lois McMaster Bujold
Born place: in Columbus, Ohio, The United States
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“Here.” He lifted the jiswar into her arms. “You have the distinct appearance of a woman in need of something warm and furry.”
― K.M. Weiland, quote from Dreamlander
“The much lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Grenzbegriff [limit or ideal notion] marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life … [But] when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.”
― quote from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“This is because she doesn't know about me picking a fight with Shruggy Jesus or rolling around topless with Lukas. My soul has already put on a blinker for the Hell exit, and now I live at hippie camp. That's like sending me into the express lane.”
― Emery Lord, quote from The Names They Gave Us
“There are youngsters who prefer no talk at all when they’re upset. For them, Mom or Dad’s presence is comfort enough. One mother told us about walking into the living room and seeing her ten-year-old daughter slumped on the sofa with tear-stained eyes. The mother sat down beside her daughter, put her arms around her, murmured, “Something happened,” and sat silently with her for five minutes. Finally, her daughter sighed and said, “Thanks, Mom. I’m better now.”
― Adele Faber, quote from How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk
“Matthias and I met up again in the lab after Christmas vacations and sat down to write our paper. One major question was where to send it. Nature, the British journal, and its American counterpart Science, enjoy the most prestige and visibility in the scientific community and in the general media, and either would have been an obvious choice. But they both impose strict length limits on manuscripts, and I wanted to explain all the details of what we had done—not only to convince the world that we had the real thing but also to promote our painstaking methods of extracting and analyzing ancient DNA. In addition, I had become disenchanted with both journals because of their tendency to publish flashy ancient DNA results that did not meet the scientific criteria our group considered necessary. They often seemed more interested in publishing papers that would give them coverage in the New York Times and other major media outlets than in making sure the results were sound and likely to hold up.”
― quote from Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
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