Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?
Law can change how people behave when others are watching — that's all.
Why give you answers you wont believe?
Well, answers I don't believe would be a step forward.
He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.
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.
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.
I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be, Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are, and go ahead and LEAD.
The most evil creatures don’t desire the destruction of everything—they only desire to exploit it for themselves.
No, no, no, Hooch told himself silently. Getting even don’t amount to nothing in this world. Getting even only gets you behind. The best revenge is to get rich enough to make them all call you sir, that’s how you get even with these boys.
“I’m a terrible salesman,” he finally said. “I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it.”
“You're such a liar.”
“But I’m a beautiful liar, don’t you think?” She flashed her best smile at her friend.
“I don’t understand what men see in women anyway,” her friend answered. “Hexes or no hexes, as long as a woman has her clothes on a man can’t see what he’s interested in anyhow.”
“Calvin, what kind of trouble are you planning to make?”
“No trouble at all,” said Calvin, annoyed. “Why do you think I want to cause trouble?”
“Because you are awake.”
If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe.
The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.
“I don’t hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.”
What is the White man? What does he do?
The White man is like a human being, but he crushes all other living things under his feet.
Then why, O Ta-Kumsaw, when I look into your heart, why is it that you do not wish to hurt the White man, that you do not wish to kill the White man?
The White man doesn’t know the evil that he does. The White man doesn’t feel the peace of the land, so how can he tell the little deaths he makes? I can’t blame the White man. But I can’t let him stay. So when I make him leave this land, I won’t hate him.
What cannot be healed has been healed. What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven.
To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable.
I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right.
How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?