Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
It never occurred to you that they might be flattering you, because you don't lie.
And I says back to him, “Calvin, sounding like an educated man don’t make you educated,” and he says back to me, “I'd rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant,” and I said, “Why?” and he says to me, “Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.”
At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, still warm and beautiful, still bright and hopeful even though the forest was getting so sparse, even though the future was so dim. Cause there’s no fear of future in the song of life, just the ever-joyful present moment. That’s all I want right now, thought Alvin. The present moment, which is good enough.
Perhaps you don’t desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you.
Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too.
He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.
Why give you answers you wont believe?
Well, answers I don't believe would be a step forward.
Law can change how people behave when others are watching — that's all.
Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?
It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.
I will not be tamed, only persuaded. I will not be coerced or led blindly or tricked or bullied - I am willing only to be convinced. If you don't trust your own basic goodness enough to tell me what you're trying to do... Then you're confessing your own moral weakness and I'll never serve you.
How short life is for fools.
Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope.
Perhaps I’m hiding from myself. Perhaps I don’t want to be what I’m supposed to be. Or perhaps I don’t want to keep living the life I already started to live.
Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive.
When I am drunk I am at my best. It is the national knack of the French.
Maybe if I could bear my life as it is for one day, for one hour, for one minute, I could forget my wish to be something else.
What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he’s done, and that’s as good as any man ever gets.
“I have no fear of war,” said Arthur Stuart. “That’s when kings get to show their mettle.”
“You’re thinking of chess,” said Margaret. “In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.”
Was it worth it? To lose part of who he had been in order to live free? Perhaps this new self was better than the old.