Orson Scott Card Quotes
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He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.
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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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They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.
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I think that a good person can sometimes do wrong out of ignorance or weakness or wrong thinking, but when hard times come, the goodness wins out after all. And a bad person can often seem good and trustworthy for a long time, but when hard times come, the evil in him gets revealed.
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She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me.
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'I have no fear of war,' said Arthur Stuart. 'That’s when kings get to show their mettle.''You’re thinking of chess,' said Margaret. 'In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.'
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Verily learned to live with constant deception, hiding what he was and what he saw and what he felt and what he did from everyone around him. It was only natural that he should be drawn to the study of law.
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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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The most evil creatures don’t desire the destruction of everything-they only desire to exploit it for themselves.
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Never mind that the story had turned out to be lies and foolishness-there was always folks stupid enough to say, 'Where there’s smoke there’s fire,' when the saying should have been, 'Where there’s scandalous lies there’s always malicious believers and spreaders-around, regardless of evidence.
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How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.
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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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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.
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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 face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable.
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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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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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Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice.
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My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.
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When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.
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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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As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
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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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'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.'