Orson Scott Card: Trending quotes (page 11)

“You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven’t died yet.”

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

“His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.”

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

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

““Am I hired?”
“There is no legal way you can get me out of paying that much of my taxes.”
“On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don’t have such good connections and haven’t yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts.””

“Even the most "Rational" people — the ones who claimed not to have a religion — were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal.”

“Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?"
"Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers."
"Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?”

“What's so wrong with feeling sorry for myself? Better that than trying to get other people to feel sorry for me.”

“Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.”

“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?”

“He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.”

“We are all fools when one wise man appears.”

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

“La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience.”

“I want to see the king.
Wonderful. I'm glad for you.
Why are you so glad?
Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.”

“The ways of love are strange and hard: the love you want is always barred; the love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.”

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

““We don’t go to Fort Chicago,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “We go to the holy place.”
“A church?” asked Alvin.
Ta-Kumsaw laughed. “You White people, when you make a place holy you build walls so nothing of the land can get in. Your god is nothing and nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that could be anywhere, it doesn’t matter—nothing and nowhere.”
“Well what does make a place holy?” asked Alvin.
“Because that’s where the Red man talks to the land, and the land answers.””