Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
If I have to choose between an omnipotent God who leaves the world in this condition, and a God who has only a little bit of power but really cares and tries to make things better, I'll take you every time. Go on playing God, Hyrum. You're not bad at it. Sometimes you kind of get it right.
There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.
Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn’t understand what real badness was.
Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived.
A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.
That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.
Religion makes them crazy. Not a woman I ever met wasn’t crazy with religion.
I think that a good person can sometimes do wrong out of ignorance or weakness or wrong thinking, but when hard times come, the goodness wins out after all. And a bad person can often seem good and trustworthy for a long time, but when hard times come, the evil in him gets revealed.
Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!
My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there’s not much deserving about the matter.
I never had you, not since you escaped from the womb.
You're the only one that I would be glad to be close to forever, because all your secrets are bright and good and I love you for them.
Even the most "Rational" people — the ones who claimed not to have a religion — were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal.
You never needed anybody.
If you had ever bothered to come to know me, you'd know that that is the exact opposite of the truth.
Well, well. So we part in utter ignorance of each other.
He would rather lose his power for doing right, than keep his power by doing wrong. Because he loves his people more than he loves his office.
Men like Jackson were so upright and honest-seeming, but Hooch knew that there wasn’t no such thing as a good man, just a man who wasn’t bought yet, or wasn’t in deep enough trouble, or didn’t have the guts to reach out and take what he wanted. That’s all that virtue ever boiled down to, so far as Hooch ever saw in his life.
Do you speak Scorn and Mockery to everyone? Or just to your betters?
First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left?
Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.
Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again.