Orson Scott Card Quotes
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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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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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Love can't conquer anything. Love can't make a scholar into a warrior. Loving her can't make her love me.
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Andrew Jackson neatly resolved the issue by walking into congress and placing his hand on the Bible they kept there as a reminder of all the virtues they worked so hard to get the voters to believe they possessed.
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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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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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The others are even more likely to obey their god.Which is? It dangles between their legs.
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You know, if you hurt people enough, eventually they’ll all call you whatever you want. Maker. King. Captain. Boss. Master. Holy One. Pick your title, you can beat people into calling you that. But you don’t change yourself a bit. All you do is change the meanings of those words, so they all mean the same thing: Bully.
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She don’t set no store to see a king. Her pa a king back in Africa, and they shoot him dead. Them Portuguese slavers show her what it mean to be a king-it mean you die quick like everybody, and spill blood red like everybody, and cry out loud in pain and scared-oh, fine to be a king, and fine to see one. Do them White folk believe this lie?
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How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?
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He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more.
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The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that other people will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream.
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There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.
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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?
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The ways of love are strange and hard: the love you want is always barred; the love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.
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And then he realized that he could never make anything out of the Unmaker, could never make the Unmaker do or be anything because it was only Undoing and Unbeing. It wasn’t the Unmaker he needed to call to, it was all the living things around him, the trees, the grass, the earth, the air itself. It was the greensong that he needed to restore.
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It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.
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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.
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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.
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Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst.
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Wouldn't it have been better to change humanity so it no longer desired to destroy itself?
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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?
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A duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.
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I interpreted all you did as weakness - but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don't deserve it.