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I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions.
Orson Scott Card -
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.
Orson Scott Card
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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.
Orson Scott Card -
Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?
Orson Scott Card -
We don't admit it to ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment, we see all life before us and we understand how we chose, every day of our lives, the manner of our death.
Orson Scott Card -
This man, though, was of that rare type that knew what he wanted but didn't want anything badly enough to demand it or beg for it or hurt anyone else in the process of getting it.
Orson Scott Card -
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.
Orson Scott Card -
She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus.Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me.
Orson Scott Card
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Even the devil gives some justice to his victims, when they're beyond all help.
Orson Scott Card -
It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.
Orson Scott Card -
What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!
Orson Scott Card -
Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn’t quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?
Orson Scott Card -
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.
Orson Scott Card -
Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them. Then again, what women didn't want to decide that?
Orson Scott Card
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A duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.
Orson Scott Card -
It is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.
Orson Scott Card -
There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.
Orson Scott Card -
There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore.
Orson Scott Card -
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
Orson Scott Card -
The others are even more likely to obey their god.Which is? It dangles between their legs.
Orson Scott Card
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Marriage is about banality. Its purpose is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace.
Orson Scott Card -
And he wanted a wife. He wanted to raise children. He wanted to prove that goodness wasn’t beaten into children, that fear was not the fount from which virtue flowed. He wanted to be able to gather his family in his arms and know that not one of them dreaded the sight of him, or felt the need to lie to him in order to have his love.
Orson Scott Card -
Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope.
Orson Scott Card -
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.
Orson Scott Card