Orson Scott Card Quotes

That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.

Not that human beings need to be violent in order to be human, but if you ever lose the will to control, the will to destroy, then it must be because you choose to lose it. My role was not to force you to be gentle and kind; it was to keep you alive while you decided for yourselves what kind of people you wanted to be.

The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight.

Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance.

He didn't know if he had the right or not. Didn't know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.

Taleswapper looked at Miller.
“I'm nothing,” he said.
“A Christian isn’t nothing,” said Taleswapper.
“I'm no Christian, either.”
“Ah,” said Taleswapper. “A Deist, then, like Tom Jefferson.” The children murmured at his mention of the great man's name.
“Taleswapper, I'm a father who loves his children, a husband who loves his wife, a farmer who pays his debts, and a miller without a millstone.”

"'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."

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.

Didn't he know that when you work to destroy, you invite the Destroyer?

The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered.

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

He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more.

I've seen Australia and I've lived on an asteroid and I'd take the asteroid.

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door,
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore, And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

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