Orson Scott Card Quotes

There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore.

He exuded confidence without ever looking as if he wanted to make sure everyone else knew how confident he was.

You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.

I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions.

I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.

You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else.

If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe.

If you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault.
We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them.

Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last.

Even the devil gives some justice to his victims, when they're beyond all help.

But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost.

You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.

People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else.

For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longed to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done.

Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst.