Quotes from Orson Scott Card

Has anyone ever mentioned that when you smile, it would melt steel?

If our happiness is the purpose of God, … why are so few of us happy?' 'Perhaps he want us to have the happiness that we can only find for ourselves.

The house always smells like good food," said Piotr. "It's the perfume of love.

one tough son of a bitch

When you don't understand the consequences of your acts, how can you be blamed for them? ... You don't take the blame, he answered. But you still take responsibility. For healing the wounds you caused.

Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day." "Not in the history books," said Valentine. "Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.

The clay can become a bear," she said, "but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank.

How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

It was as if the boundary between friendship and love was so thin and imperceptible that one could cross it without even knowing it was there.

Better to give the man what he wanted and save the objections for the battles worth fighting.

We're Americans," said Ezekiel. "Nothing is close enough we don't need a car.

If you always speak your mind, the evil man will avoid you.

There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we're even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father's soul.

We could live forever, if we were willing to be stupid the whole time. Surely you're not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It's there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees — knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.

La Escuela de Batalla no nos ha creado, ya lo sabes. La Escuela de Batalla no crea nada. Solo destruye.

See these protrusions here, here, and here. That's tech.

Si sabes lo que es la locura, tal vez no caigas en ella.

Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance.

We are only human when we are part of a community.

So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.

The PCs were willing, but the powers that be didn't want to commit troops.