Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
If I wanted to doubt then I could doubt endlessly. But at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.
Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them. Then again, what women didn't want to decide that?
Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self we will become together.
The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered.
By the time Verily was sixteen, a sturdy and rather good-looking young man of some education and impeccable manners, he had become a thoroughgoing skeptic. If the dogmas about witchery could be so hopelessly wrong, how could any of the teachings of the ministers be relied upon? It left Verily Cooper at loose ends, intellectually speaking, for all his teachers spoke as if religion were the cornerstone of all other learning, and yet all of Verily’s actual studies led him to the conclusion that sciences founded upon religion were uncertain at best, utterly bogus at worst.
He didn’t know if he had the right or not. Didn’t know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.
“I see Alvin with a son. That what he want most.”
“I see him with a woman,” said Rien. “That is what he miss the most.”
“I see him kneeling by a child’s grave,” said Dead Mary. “That is what he fears the most.”
How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?
She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like 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.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
Like all children they only wanted to be known, and cared little about giving that gift to others.
Andrew Jackson neatly resolved the issue by walking into congress and placing his hand on the Bible they kept there as a reminder of all the virtues they worked so hard to get the voters to believe they possessed.
If something just plain didn’t make sense to Alvin, he didn’t believe it, and no amount of quoting from the Bible would convince him. Now Taleswapper was telling him that he was right to refuse to believe things that made no sense.
Something had been given back to him. And because [she] had been a part of it, there was something between them now. A bond of loss, if loss could bind.
Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.
I want to see the king.
Wonderful. I'm glad for you.
Why are you so glad?
Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.
This man, though, was of that rare type that knew what he wanted but didn't want anything badly enough to demand it or beg for it or hurt anyone else in the process of getting it.
This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard.
Lolla-Wossiky is left like a White man then. Cut off from the land. Ground crunching underfoot. Branches snagging. Roots tripping. Animals running away.