Orson Scott Card

"No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him."

"You really are children. You have no idea how power works, or who has it, or what you can actually do with it."

"He would rather lose his power for doing right, than keep his power by doing wrong. Because he loves his people more than he loves his office."

"Like all children they only wanted to be known, and cared little about giving that gift to others."

"God's hand is strange to us. He cares nothing for the moment, nothing for the feeble ambitions of men and women. He sees the road that flows onward forever."

"You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me."

"The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes."

"God had answered her prayer, not with the thing she asked for, but rather the thing she wanted most in her heart."

"Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance."

"To be cut off from the land of the living, and yet not to be dead. How could I bear that? That's how most men live, and don't even know it."

"Some people can't see miracles when they're right in the middle of them. Better than seeing miracles that don't exist. You're determined to stand entirely alone, aren't you? That's where I've always stood."

"It never occurred to you that they might be flattering you, because you don't lie."

"It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead."

"This man, though, was of that rare type that knew what he wanted but didn't want anything badly enough to demand it or beg for it or hurt anyone else in the process of getting it."

"He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust."

"She got out of the car in a smooth motion that [he] found attractive precisely because it did not seem designed to make men watch her do it."

"That was the most terrible thing that a woman could [??] to a decent man: look vulnerable and ask him for mercy. If he refused her he'd be denying all his instincts as a provider and protector."

"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?"

"How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?"

"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."

"Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?"

"Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers."

"We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again."

"She never seemed to get near the edge. She lived on other people's edges. And when they fell off, she'd admire how pretty they looked as they fell."

"I believed all that stuff about pleasing myself. Can't be done. You can't please yourself by doing what you want. Because it doesn't mean anything if it's just you. There has to be somebody it matters to."

"You aren't the kind of guy who takes the law into his own hands. You left the law in other hands and it screwed you over pretty badly."

"I think if you left grownups to do what they really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone."

"Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope."

"There's always hope... even when there isn't faith. And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity."

"In Vanya's family, silence had never meant surrender, only tactical retreat."

"We're both damaged property, I guess. Plenty of time for renovation."

"What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult."

"Good people can't out-think evil, 'cause evil think of things good folks can't think of. Can't enter your head what evil do."

"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."

"Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable."

"I never had you, not since you escaped from the womb."

"More than likely, mother would simply go enigmatic on him, give him one of her inscrutable smiles, and tell him that if he didn't already understand, he never would."

"How strange it was that this other woman, this girl-child, should speak of her son so possessively, should speak of his future as if it were her own future."

"Marriage is about banality. Its purpose is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace."

"I don't know you, ma'am, and apparently I'm expected to die for you."

"Was his very boyishness the reason he was chosen? In that case, was it not a virtue to be admired, and not a failing to be despised?"

"Living with a god is not what it's cracked up to be. They think their women should be grateful just to have them around."

"How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that."

"It was his father who had shrunk, who no longer had the power of the giant, of the god, to enfold him and keep him safe."

"How could you lose me, when you've never had me, never wanted me?"

"Having never been in control of his own life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free."

"In the absence of understanding, that was a good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were. Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy? Was there really any difference?"

""Women's intuition" wasn't intuition at all, it was heightened observation, unconscious registration of subtle clues."

"I took the leap, yes, but I didn't like the ledge where I landed — I fought the bear, I kissed the princess, but now I don't want to be king. Well, where in the fairy tales did it ever say Cinderella had to like being queen?"

"They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer."