Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
What's so wrong with feeling sorry for myself? Better that than trying to get other people to feel sorry for me.
Some people can't see miracles when they're right in the middle of them.
Better than seeing miracles that don't exist.
You're determined to stand entirely alone, aren't you?
That's where I've always stood.
“Lookit that,” he said. “A lawyer who knows how to do something useful. That’s a miracle.”
I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!
Today, I saw a spark of decency. Let's blow on that spark and give it fuel.
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.
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
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 don't know you, ma'am, and apparently I'm expected to die for you.
Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?
Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.
My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.
What the White man had won with so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but the corpse of that land. It was decay that the White man won. It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it.
Having never been in control of his own life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free.
Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does.
“You speak metaphorically, I hope,” said Peggy.
“I hope not,” said Becca. “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”
A duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.
The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight.
Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause.
That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival.