Orson Scott Card Quotes
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That was the most terrible thing that a woman could to a decent man: look vulnerable and ask him for mercy. If he refused her he'd be denying all his instincts as a provider and protector.
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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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He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.
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'I don’t have to be a gentleman,' said Balzac. 'I am an artist.'
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This is serious, and you gotta keep your mind open in case an idea comes along-you want there to be some room for it to fit in.
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'Are you all right, sir?' asked Hezekiah.'Just fighting over old battles in my mind,' said John. 'It’s the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I’m the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.'
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You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear.
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How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.
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In Vanya's family, silence had never meant surrender, only tactical retreat.
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Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him 'Look at what you made me do!' That's the moral universe that they always lived in.
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I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them - if they're unknown, it's because no one asked.
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Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever.
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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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'Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?''Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers.''Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?'
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Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist.Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.
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I immediately felt so comfortable there. Or if not comfortable, at least willing to bear the discomforts because they fit the awkward places in my heart.
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Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too.
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They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be.
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''Waterloo was won,'' quoted Rackham, ''on the playing fields of Eton.'' 'What the hell does that mean?' asked Carn Carby. 'You never even went to Eton.' 'It was an analogy,' said Rackham. 'If you hadn't spent your entire childhood playing war games, you'd actually know something. You're all so uneducated.'
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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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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.
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Something had been given back to him. And because she had been a part of it, there was something between them now. A bond of loss, if loss could bind.
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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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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.