Lois McMaster Quotes
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They stared at her curiously, and she caught snatches of conversation in two or three languages. It wasn't hard to guess their content, and she smiled a bit primly. Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range - and with a coup to plan for the end.
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My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.
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I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
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I'm sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.
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If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.
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The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.
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A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his liegewoman's breasts and cry--even if he is at a convenient height for it.
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Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.
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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.
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Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.
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Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard
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It’s important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.
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My home is not a place, it is people.
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I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself.
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The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded.
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If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.
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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.
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And this was your friend?" Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.
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The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.
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I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!
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All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, a scientist, an artist, or an entrepreneur. In service of their goals, they lay down time, energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self.
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Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.
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Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.
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I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.