“Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren’t afraid of truth.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 4 “La Tia” (p. 72).
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Orson Scott Card 586
American science fiction novelist 1951Related quotes
“Her burdens were her own and burdens were for shoulders strong enough to bear them.”
Variant: Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.
Source: Gone with the Wind
“Knowledge is a terrible burden. It may help you, but it might also destroy you.”
Source: The Angel Experiment
“Is it for this purpose that we are strong—that we may have light burdens to bear?”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXVIII: On the Healing Power of the Mind
“… the truth holds the greatest magic, the greatest beauty, and sometimes the greatest danger….”
Source: Sphinx's Princess
“The terrible burden of having nothing to do.”
Le pénible fardeau de n'avoir rien à faire.
Epistle 11
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Context: How can one person be more real than any other? Well some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are hiding — escaping encounters, avoiding suprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience — maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who are afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of liars hell. Some folks hide and some folks seek, and seeking when its mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look, and won't turn tail should they find it — and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway, because nothing, neither the terrible truth, nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas.
