Orson Scott Card Quotes

He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter.

He had left home to get away, not to go toward anything. There was no greater freedom than that.

Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too.

I've known too many men who never quite felt married no matter how many wives they'd been through. Their own and otherwise.

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

She don't set no store to see a king. Her pa a king back in Africa, and they shoot him dead. Them Portuguese slavers show her what it mean to be a king—it mean you die quick like everybody, and spill blood red like everybody, and cry out loud in pain and scared—oh, fine to be a king, and fine to see one. Do them White folk believe this lie?

A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.

I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives.

You can't change what you don't understand.

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

Do you speak Scorn and Mockery to everyone? Or just to your betters?

Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!

The others are even more likely to obey their god.
Which is? It dangles between their legs.

They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.

“Everybody thinks they want to see the truth,” said Tenkswa-Tawa. “That’s one of the lies we tell ourselves.”