Orson Scott Card Quotes
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Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.
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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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Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?
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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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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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'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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She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind.
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My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.
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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.
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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.
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There must be a special place in hell reserved for you.I've been to hell. It's a better place than this.
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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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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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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'm nobody's child.You're mine now. Not my child, but mine, to miss you when you go, to look out for you, to hope you'll be careful.
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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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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.
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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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'You're such a liar.''But I’m a beautiful liar, don’t you think?' She flashed her best smile at her friend.'I don’t understand what men see in women anyway,' her friend answered. 'Hexes or no hexes, as long as a woman has her clothes on a man can’t see what he’s interested in anyhow.'
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It never occurred to you that they might be flattering you, because you don't lie.
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My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.
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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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It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.
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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.'