Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

You had to be tough to survive being in the hospital during the Civil War.

But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.

I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it's never over

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.

Death is better than disease.

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

I think Heaven will not be as good as earth, unless it bring with it that sweet power to remember, which is the staple of Heaven here.

We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone... So, I think that's part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It's almost infectious... if somebody is closer to death, they're almost a bad omen and I think that's terrible.

In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

I notice the silvery hair at his temples with a tinge of sadness. Why do parents grow old? Life is a castle of lies slowly dismantled by the passage of time. I regret not spending more time looking at the people I love.

A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

I should like to have been killed in the war.

My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.

The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Well, we're all dying in increments. I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying.

They were very short, the golden years. The golden years are when you can sit back, hopefully, and exchange memories. And that's the worst part about this disease. There's nobody to exchange memories with.

The last great Englishman is low.

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.