Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives.
"Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?"
"Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers."
"Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?"
Doesn't love show its face when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for the loved one's sake alone?
I'm losing Savanna.
That's good. No one should own someone else.
He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.
“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.”
Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are.
If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?
Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women.
I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew.
"Women's intuition" wasn't intuition at all, it was heightened observation, unconscious registration of subtle clues.
It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.
There must be a special place in hell reserved for you.
I've been to hell. It's a better place than this.
“I always play with everybody,” said Honoré. “It is my vocation. God put me on the earth to do with people what cats do to mice. Play with them, chew the last bit of life out of them, them pick them up in my mouth and drop them on people’s doorsteps. That is the business of literature.”
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.
I don't know a soul who doesn't maintain two separate lists of doctrines — the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by.
I own the whole world, and folks haven’t been keeping up too well on the payments.
She never seemed to get near the edge. She lived on other people's edges. And when they fell off, she'd admire how pretty they looked as they fell.
Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.
I’m neutral on lying, seeing as how there’s times when the truth just hurts people.