Orson Scott Card Quotes
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I don't know a soul who doesn't maintain two separate lists of doctrines - the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by.
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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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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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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 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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'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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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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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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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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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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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 sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind.
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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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'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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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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A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it.
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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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Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.
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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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If you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault.We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them.
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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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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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He wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there.
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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.