Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in.
Love can't conquer anything. Love can't make a scholar into a warrior. Loving her can't make her love me.
It was not love at all, really, but rather a yearning for the honor and respect of the other men that held them. Pride, then... Indeed, all their connection with each other at this moment was tied up with the respect they felt they were earning by their actions.
A dagger has only a single point, but a traitor cuts from anywhere.
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.
You are sure your enemy is stupid because he doesn't do things as you would do them. It will make you careless, and your enemy will surprise you.