Orson Scott Card Quotes
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Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult.
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'Calvin, what kind of trouble are you planning to make?''No trouble at all,' said Calvin, annoyed. 'Why do you think I want to cause trouble?''Because you are awake.'
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He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death.
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'What kind of stupid tale is that, when we just have to look at each other to know it isn’t true?''It has problems, I admit.'
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Stop threatening me... I've lived in terror and I've come out of it. Kill me or not, torture me or not, it doesn't matter to me. Just decide what to do.
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'You're such a liar.''But I’m a beautiful liar, don’t you think?' She flashed her best smile at her friend.'I don’t understand what men see in women anyway,' her friend answered. 'Hexes or no hexes, as long as a woman has her clothes on a man can’t see what he’s interested in anyhow.'
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Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive.
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Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.
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They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.
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Road poured out into a place of meadows and a few White man’s buildings. Lots of wagons. Horses posted and tied, grazing on the meadow grass. Sounds of metal hammers ringing, chopping of axes in the wood, screech of saws going back and forth, all kinds of White-man forest-killing sounds. A White man’s town.
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You as stupid as they come. Of course, I say this with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them.
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I wanted your songs.You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs.
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Keep your freedom, keep your immortality, but somewhere along the line I hope you figure out what you're living forever for. What noble purpose you mean to achieve. Because you're no good to anyone here, not even yourselves.
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He could afford to be generous, since he didn’t have to pay for it himself. Most virtues were like that. People could take pride in how virtuous they were, but the fact was that as soon as virtue got expensive or inconvenient, it was amazing how fast it gave way to practical concerns.
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That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation.
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Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart: you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning.
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Verily learned to live with constant deception, hiding what he was and what he saw and what he felt and what he did from everyone around him. It was only natural that he should be drawn to the study of law.
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Love is random; fear is inevitable.
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The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.
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If I wanted to doubt then I could doubt endlessly. But at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.
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Verily wondered what the man could have the audacity to say, in the face of such evidence-what whining, sniveling complaint or protest he might utter.
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'Everybody thinks they want to see the truth,' said Tenkswa-Tawa. 'That’s one of the lies we tell ourselves.'
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'I don’t hold with prophets,' said Alvin. 'Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.'
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What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult.