Quotes from Orson Scott Card

it would probably be a good deal better than their worst fears and nowhere near as good as their best hopes.

I wonder what it would be like to love and trust a man so much that I'd be willing to abase myself as Kate did. Is there something in women that makes us long to be humbled? Or is it something in human beings, that when we are overmastered, we rejoice in our subjection?

She was copious, her sap-filled veins, her skeleton of wood, her tingling leaves that bathed in light, her roots that tapped into seas of water salted with the stuff of life.

Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation.

Hay periodos en que el mundo se reestructura, y en esos períodos las palabras precisas pueden cambiar el mundo.

Conservar la dignidad y mostrar respeto donde es debido, para que la derrota no sea una deshonra.

Saber qué hacer con un batallón es fácil —dijo Ender—. Conseguir que lo hagan es lo difícil. ¿Por

but this is the culture of China. There is no nation other than China, no society and traditions worth preserving other than those found in China, no people more important than the Chinese.

Life is how God gives purpose to the universe.

When you really know somebody, you can't hate them.' 'Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them.

For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven. Maybe I could have been content. Maybe not.

Excuse me, but if God wanted to do everything himself, what did he make us for in the first place?

You killed more people than anybody in history.' 'Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.

Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It's like war—does any war ever settle anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it? And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men.

Era algo nuevo en el mundo, dos reinas que se querían y se ayudaban en vez de combatir, y juntas fueron más fuertes que ninguna otra colmena.

In our wars with the west," said Lankowski, "we learned to bury everything that we did not want blown up. Individually-targeted bombs were first tested on Arabs, did you know that? The archives are full of pictures of exploding Arabs.

we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. They

You can tell a lie now and then, but what happens to you when you try to live your whole life inside a lie?

Nobody knows more than can be learned in a single lifetime

It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.

Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.

There's no part of the ceremony where the priest, acting in the place of God, warns the guests not to murder the bridegroom because it might jeopardize the succession.