Orson Scott Card

You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else.

Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope.

You can't change what you don't understand.

Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last.

“This is Alvin Smith,” said Cooper. “He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.”

The older you get, the more you believe in God, whatever face he wears.

Only a fool can't be fooled.

“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?”

“Did they program brattiness into you?”
“That’s a trait I developed for myself,” she said. “Do you like it?”

We are all fools when one wise man appears.

It's plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated.

In his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and lead you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the presence of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me.

Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them. Then again, what women didn't want to decide that?

There were always people searching for the Unmaker, for some awful destructive power outside themselves. Poor fools, they always thought that Destruction was merely destruction, they were using it and when they were done with it, they'd set to building. But you don't build on a foundation of destruction. That's the dark secret of the Unmaker, Alvin thought. Once he sets you to tearing down, it's hard to get back to building, hard to get your own self back. The digger wears out the ground and the spade. And once you let yourself be a tool in the Unmaker's hand, he'll wear you out, he'll tear you down, he'll dull you and hole you and all the time you'll be thining you're so sharp and fine and bright and whole, and you never go till he lets go of you, lets you drop and fall. What's that clatter? Why, that was me. That was me, sounding like a wore-out tool. What you leaving me for? I still got use left in me?
But you don't, not when the Unmaker's got you.

There must be a special place in hell reserved for you.
I've been to hell. It's a better place than this.