Orson Scott Card Quotes
-
Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will - will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth.
-
Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice.
-
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.
-
'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?'
-
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.
-
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
-
You think my apology means I'm weak. But it doesn't. It means I am trying to learn how to be strong.
-
They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be.
-
We are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics.
-
In Vanya's family, silence had never meant surrender, only tactical retreat.
-
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.
-
Honesty always sounds like impudence to the vain and stupid.
-
Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.
-
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.
-
Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell.
-
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.
-
He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It has been my experience that the better a man you are, the more folks there are who resent you for it, and find occasion to get angry at you no matter how kindly meant your deeds may be.
-
''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.'
-
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.
-
We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.
-
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.