Orson Scott Card Quotes
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I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.
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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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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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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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Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.
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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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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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She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus.Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me.
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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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'I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature,' he said, irritated at my failure to respond. 'Nature's virtue is intact,' I reassured him. 'I just know some different laws.'
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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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The barrier was only in my mind - which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away.
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Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers.
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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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Peggy chose her words to be true, and therefore beautiful, and therefore good.
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It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.
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I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew.
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'This is Alvin Smith,' said Cooper. 'He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.'
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The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered.
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If something just plain didn’t make sense to Alvin, he didn’t believe it, and no amount of quoting from the Bible would convince him. Now Taleswapper was telling him that he was right to refuse to believe things that made no sense.
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I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives.
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They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer.
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Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance.
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Only a fool can't be fooled.