Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!
The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.
She can’t help her red skin, and she isn’t heathen. In fact, she’s a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder.
Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist.
Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.
Adolescents never understand that the best way to avoid notice is to behave normally.
Nafai knew the rule: when a man acts like a child, he's boyish, and everyone's delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he's childish, and everyone tells him to be a man.
What Alvin figured out was that when you’re Making, you don’t use people like tools. You don’t wear them out to achieve your purpose. You wear yourself out helping them achieve theirs. You wear yourself out teaching and guiding, persuading and listening to advice and letting folks persuade you, when it happens they’re right.
I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.
"'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."
I don't know why people who got what they need to be happy don’t just go ahead and be happy.
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 as stupid as they come. Of course, I say this with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them.
Good people can't out-think evil, 'cause evil think of things good folks can't think of. Can't enter your head what evil do.
The older you get, the more you believe in God, whatever face he wears.
Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.
“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 wanted your songs.
You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs.
“We don’t go to Fort Chicago,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “We go to the holy place.”
“A church?” asked Alvin.
Ta-Kumsaw laughed. “You White people, when you make a place holy you build walls so nothing of the land can get in. Your god is nothing and nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that could be anywhere, it doesn’t matter—nothing and nowhere.”
“Well what does make a place holy?” asked Alvin.
“Because that’s where the Red man talks to the land, and the land answers.”
Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational.
When you have enough money the law is a reed that will always bend your way.