Orson Scott Card Quotes
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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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Last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid.
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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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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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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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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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How short life is for fools.
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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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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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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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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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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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How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?
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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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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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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 others are even more likely to obey their god.Which is? It dangles between their legs.
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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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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.
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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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A duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.
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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.
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Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn’t understand what real badness was.