Orson Scott Card Quotes
-
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.
-
If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe.
-
Do you speak Scorn and Mockery to everyone? Or just to your betters?
-
You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!
-
They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be.
-
The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.
-
''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.'
-
How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.
-
'I don’t have to be a gentleman,' said Balzac. 'I am an artist.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind.
-
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?
-
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.
-
There must be a special place in hell reserved for you.I've been to hell. It's a better place than this.
-
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.