Orson Scott Card

How strange it was that this other woman, this girl-child, should speak of her son so possessively, should speak of his future as if it were her own future.

Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.

Will I be coming to you as husband or a child? A partner or a student?

Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers.

Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth.

Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational.

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

Maybe he's growing up.
Or maybe he just needed the right circumstances to discover the best in himself.

We've seen the worst that men can do, pa, and been the worst that men can be. But that don't mean that someday we won't see the best, too. And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can still be pretty good, can't we?

Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live.

They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be.

"'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."

A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it.

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

It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.