“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?"
"I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?"
"Yes," she said.
"That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement."
It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?" asked Wang-mu.
"I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes," said Peter.
"Then let's do it. That's us in spades.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Firequencher raised his hand. "I've been staying out of family conversations. Do I get credit for that?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two.
The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew.
The changeless part was always true, The growing part was always new,
And I wondered, when the tale was through, Which part was me, and which was you.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“If one has to say, in an argument, "I am intelligent! I do know things!" then one might as well stop arguing.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“He was only a child, doing what adults led him to do; but somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child's acts are real acts, that even a child's play is not without moral context.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“It's not enough just to laugh at good fortune and say, 'Enough already.' You have to really mean it -- that you have enough. And because you mean it, you take the surplus and you give it away. Similarly, when bad fortune comes, you bear it until it becomes unbearable -- your family is hungry, or you can no longer function in your work. And then again you say, 'Enough already,' and you change something. You move; you change careers; you let your spouse make all the decisions. Something. You don't endure the unendurable.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“Will we be extinguished? What difference does it make then, the ones of us who had plans, what does it matter the work we’ve done? The children we’ve raised? He looked pointedly at Olhado. “What will it matter then, that you have such a big happy family, if you’re all erased in one instant by that … bomb?
“Not one moment of my life with my family has been wasted,” said Olhado quietly.
“But the point of it is to go on, isn’t it? To connect with the future?”
“That’s one part, yes,” said Olhado. “But part of the purpose of it is now, is the moment. And part of it is the web of connections. Links from soul to soul. If the purpose of life was just to continue into the future, then none of it would have meaning, because it would be all anticipation and preparation. There’s fruition, Grego. There’s the happiness we’ve already had. The happiness of each moment. The end of our lives, even if there’s no forward continuation, no progeny at all, the end of our lives doesn’t erase the beginning.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
“...it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. 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.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Children of the Mind
Orson Scott Card
Born place: in Richland, Washington, The United States
Born date August 24, 1951
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“And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life. As”
― John Dos Passos, quote from Three Soldiers
“A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.”
― quote from Once a Runner
“Sometimes, a girl just has to dive under the duvet and regroup.”
― Jody Gehrman, quote from Confessions of a Triple Shot Betty
“I shall set down in a few lines how uptight Maldoror was during his early years, when he lived happy. There: done. He later perceived he was born wicked: strange mischance! For a great many years he concealed his character as best he could; but in the end, because this effort was not natural to him, each day the blood would rush to his head until, unable any longer to bear such a life, he hurled himself resolutely into a career of evil … sweet atmosphere! Who could guess whenever he hugged a rosycheeked young child, that he was longing to hack off those cheeks with a razor and would have done so often had not the idea of Justice and her long cortège of punishments restrained him on every occasion.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, quote from Maldoror and the Complete Works
“Daddy didn’t say anything for a minute or so, and then he reached up and caught a firefly as it glowed beside him. “See this light?” he asked me when the firefly lit up his hand. “Yes’r.” “That light is bright enough to light up a little speck of the night sky so a man can see it a ways away. That’s what God expects us to do. We’re to be lights in the dark, cold days that are this world. Like fireflies in December.”
― Jennifer Erin Valent, quote from Fireflies in December
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The Prayer of Jabez:...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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