Orson Scott Card Quotes
-
'I’m a terrible salesman,' he finally said. 'I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it.'
-
She did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Love can't conquer anything. Love can't make a scholar into a warrior. Loving her can't make her love me.
-
How short life is for fools.
-
We are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics.
-
Wouldn't it have been better to change humanity so it no longer desired to destroy itself?
-
Very bad thing, killing little boy. But maybe Red man knows about whisky-Red, very thirsty, making crazy. Not like killing man to take his house or his woman or his land, like White man all the time.
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
You are sure your enemy is stupid because he doesn't do things as you would do them. It will make you careless, and your enemy will surprise you.
-
'This is Alvin Smith,' said Cooper. 'He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.'
-
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?
-
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.
-
There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.
-
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.
-
Not that human beings need to be violent in order to be human, but if you ever lose the will to control, the will to destroy, then it must be because you choose to lose it. My role was not to force you to be gentle and kind; it was to keep you alive while you decided for yourselves what kind of people you wanted to be.
-
That’s the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own.
-
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.
-
How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?
-
Last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid.
-
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.
-
He didn’t know if he had the right or not. Didn’t know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.