Orson Scott Card Quotes

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

Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn't understand what real badness was.

La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience.

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.

I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew.

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.

I don't mind dying before you do. In fact, I rather prefer it that way.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

You're the only one that I would be glad to be close to forever, because all your secrets are bright and good and I love you for them.

Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell.

The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that other people will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream.

When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.

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.

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.

“I’m a terrible salesman,” he finally said. “I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it.”