Orson Scott Card Quotes

Lolla-Wossiky is left like a White man then. Cut off from the land. Ground crunching underfoot. Branches snagging. Roots tripping. Animals running away.

I'm losing Savanna.
That's good. No one should own someone else.

How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?

I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.

And I says back to him, “Calvin, sounding like an educated man don’t make you educated,” and he says back to me, “I'd rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant,” and I said, “Why?” and he says to me, “Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.”

Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable.

How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.

He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.

To be cut off from the land of the living, and yet not to be dead. How could I bear that?
That's how most men live, and don't even know it.

You always do that. Make all the questions harder.
I make them truer.

We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.

You are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too.

“This is today’s puzzle,” he said. “If the act of denial can be taken as proof of the crime, how can an innocent man defend himself?” The tithingmen caught him by the arms. “Come along now, Mr. Emerson, and don’t go trying any philosophy on us.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Waldo. “Philosophy would be wasted against such sturdy-headed men as you.”
“Glad you know it,” said the tithingman proudly. “Wouldn’t want you thinking we weren’t true Christians.”

At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, still warm and beautiful, still bright and hopeful even though the forest was getting so sparse, even though the future was so dim. Cause there's no fear of future in the song of life, just the ever-joyful present moment. That's all I want right now, thought Alvin. The present moment, which is good enough.

That reminded John Paul of what Andrew had said when he was teaching him to play chess. “You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.” John Paul understood the principle as soon as Andrew explained it. But he stopped playing chess anyway, because he didn't care what happened to little plastic figures on a board of sixty-four squares.