Orson Scott Card Quotes

“You must be a prophet right enough,” said Alvin Junior, “cause I can’t understand a thing you said.”

The most evil creatures don’t desire the destruction of everything—they only desire to exploit it for themselves.

“I don’t hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.”

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.

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

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.”

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

“I was ordained,” said the preacher. “No one ordains artists. They ordain themselves.”
Just as Taleswapper had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter.

I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.

The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.

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

She grunted. “Nothing unusual?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, if you ask me, that’s pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.”

Land was what they wanted, as if the mere ownership of dirt could turn a peasant into a squire.

The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second.

That's the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own.