Orson Scott Card Quotes
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How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.
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To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.
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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.
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She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind.
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Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.
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The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it.
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There's always hope... even when there isn't faith. And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity.
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Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult.
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It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent.
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'I always play with everybody,' said Honoré. 'It is my vocation. God put me on the earth to do with people what cats do to mice. Play with them, chew the last bit of life out of them, them pick them up in my mouth and drop them on people’s doorsteps. That is the business of literature.'
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''A woman's wisdom is her gift to women,'' Peggy quoted. ''Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God.''
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The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight.
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She got out of the car in a smooth motion that he found attractive precisely because it did not seem designed to make men watch her do it.
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It was not love at all, really, but rather a yearning for the honor and respect of the other men that held them. Pride, then... Indeed, all their connection with each other at this moment was tied up with the respect they felt they were earning by their actions.
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There's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing.
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How could you lose me, when you've never had me, never wanted me?
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A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it.
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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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He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost. He didn’t need no philosopher to tell him that.
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Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.
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'Don’t you think it’s ironic that you have no idea what you’re supposed to do,' said Verily, 'and yet so many people have gone to so much trouble to prevent you from doing it?'
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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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We've seen the worst that men can do, pa, and been the worst that men can be. But that don't mean that someday we won't see the best, too. And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can still be pretty good, can't we?
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This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard.