Lois McMaster Quotes
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I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.
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I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.
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Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.
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Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.
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I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.
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Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.
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Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't Panic." "I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining .
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A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
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Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it.
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I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe." "'Know thyself.'" "We try, sir.
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Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.
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Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.
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Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.
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A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.
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Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
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Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.
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I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.
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An honor is not diminished for being shared.
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I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.
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As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor
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If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
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I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.
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There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.
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War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.