Orson Scott Card Quotes

She did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her.

Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.

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

What cannot be healed has been healed. What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven.

I wanted your songs.
You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs.

The White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man's way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn't need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.

She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now.

Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause.

There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.

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.

The vision of the gods without the power of the gods. What a terrible gift.<p>A glorious gift.

She will look at you as women look at men, and she will judge you as women judge men — not on the strength of their arguments, and not on their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of their passion, the strength of their soul, their compassion, and — ah, this above all — their conversation.

We were all victims of an oppressive system, but that mattered far less to us than our deep bonding with our owners.

I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people.

[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there.