Orson Scott Card

"You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear."

"The others are even more likely to obey their god. Which is? It dangles between their legs."

"Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist. Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it."

"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."

"Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self we will become together."

"You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told. So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person."

"I interpreted all you did as weakness — but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don't deserve it."

"Doesn't love show its face when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for the loved one's sake alone?"

"I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives."

"Maybe he's growing up. Or maybe he just needed the right circumstances to discover the best in himself."

"Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are."

"Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then."

"I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female."

"The barrier was only in my mind — which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away."

"Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do."

"Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again."

"Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable."

"That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival."

"May the day when you need courage never come. Even as she said it, though, she knew the day would come."

"You're the only one that I would be glad to be close to forever, because all your secrets are bright and good and I love you for them."

"Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever."

"He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more."

"What cannot be healed has been healed. What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven."

"Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in."

"Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does."

"Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking."

"I don't mind dying before you do. In fact, I rather prefer it that way."

"I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later."

"Most of the things people say they remember they only imagine anyways."

"We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be."

"Today, I saw a spark of decency. Let's blow on that spark and give it fuel."

"We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts."

"Out of respect for custom he treats me as if all women were equally worthless. He gives custom more respect than he gives me."

"He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends."

"What difference does it make, whether we keep our silence because [they] force us or because we're afraid they might force us?"

"I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!"

"Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism."

"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."

"I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked."

"Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational."

"Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons."

"If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?"

"You always do that. Make all the questions harder. I make them truer."

"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?"

"That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation."

"Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?"

"It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies."

"Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice."

"The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future."