Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
The vision of the gods without the power of the gods. What a terrible gift.
Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.
“You,” said Purity, “have been long enough out of England to pick up some American brag.”
“But surrounded by Americans as I am,” said Cooper, “my brag is like a farthing in a sack of guineas.”
I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again. Nobody was particularly glad to see me.
She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now.
You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.
I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts... And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else.
I was forgetting how it really was, I was remembering it through common, ordinary eyes, I was remembering it as the boy I was before, but now I remember that it wasn't me being weak or me being naked, or anything else that I should be ashamed of.
Just because you believe it doesn’t make it so.
Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren’t afraid of truth.
Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart: you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning.
If you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault.
We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them.
La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience.
The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes.
It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent.
People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else.
I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
You are so intent that you believe only what you believe that you believe, that you remain utterly blind to what you really believe without believing that you believe it.
Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons.