Quotes By Author: Orson Scott Card
“I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn’t want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.”
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“Miro, I’m so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement.”It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.”
“It’s as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.”
“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
“How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.”
“…you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.”
“The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.”
“You were baptized?””My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it.” The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. “Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in.”
“And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor”
“You frighten me, when you say there isn’t time.””I don’t see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.””But it keeps not ending.””So far, so good.”
“You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor,” the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.The Speaker’s smile was just as chilly. “And you’re the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn’t talk to me.”
“I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story’s factuality…[rather] to a story’s causality – whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.”
“I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.”
“It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.”