513 Quotes by Lois McMaster Bujold

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.... The friction tends to arise when the two are not the same....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."

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.... The friction tends to arise when the tow are not the same....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."

"Don’t be afraid,” she said. “The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.”Yes, he thought, the good face pain. But the great—they embrace it."

"Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me."

"Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards."

"The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real."

"He wanted to know what I saw in you. I told him..." he paused again, and then continued almost shyly, "that you poured out honor like a fountain, all around you." "That's weird. I don't feel full of honor, or anything else, except maybe confusion.""Naturally not. Fountains keep nothing for themselves."

"Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease—that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it."

"everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location."

"But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man."