Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.
“This is Alvin Smith,” said Cooper. “He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.”
Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put in him, the goodness he had put on himself as a disguise in order to get her to marry him.
He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends.
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.
We are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics.
Was his very boyishness the reason he was chosen? In that case, was it not a virtue to be admired, and not a failing to be despised?
She did love him, you know... It was a selfish, possessive love, but it was all she knew how to give.
“A liar sees lies,” said Taleswapper. “Even when they aren’t there. Just as a hypocrite sees hypocrites whenever he runs across good people. Can’t stand to think that anyone might really be what you only pretend to be.”
The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.
As he had so many times before, Taleswapper addressed a few silent words to God, which always came down to this question: Why do you put us to so much trouble, when it all comes to naught in the end?...And, as usual, God had nothing much to say to Taleswapper when his questioning was done.
I don't mind dying before you do. In fact, I rather prefer it that way.
When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.
The Lord took twice the time making thee, Alvin Smith, cause it took that long to put the mischief in.
Every terrible thing in the world was caused by a whole combination of things. But everybody wanted to narrow it down to one cause—and not even the real one. Much better to have one cause—one person to punish. Then the unbearable could be borne.
Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.
[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there.
Stop threatening me... I've lived in terror and I've come out of it. Kill me or not, torture me or not, it doesn't matter to me. Just decide what to do.
I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked
You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me.