Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers.
In the absence of understanding, that was a good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were. Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy? Was there really any difference?
Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a little queen. And your mercy will be your undoing.
How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?
Keeping secrets was the beginning of freedom.
And then he realized that he could never make anything out of the Unmaker, could never make the Unmaker do or be anything because it was only Undoing and Unbeing. It wasn’t the Unmaker he needed to call to, it was all the living things around him, the trees, the grass, the earth, the air itself. It was the greensong that he needed to restore.
Peggy chose her words to be true, and therefore beautiful, and therefore good.
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.”
You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven’t died yet.
It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.
“The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden,” said Papa Moose, “now that snakes can’t talk.”
I think if you left grownups to do what they really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone.
How could you lose me, when you've never had me, never wanted me?
Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell.
Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable.
To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.
We are all fools when one wise man appears.
That was the most terrible thing that a woman could to a decent man: look vulnerable and ask him for mercy. If he refused her he'd be denying all his instincts as a provider and protector.
You think my apology means I'm weak. But it doesn't. It means I am trying to learn how to be strong.
Verily wondered what the man could have the audacity to say, in the face of such evidence—what whining, sniveling complaint or protest he might utter.