Orson Scott Card · 212 pages
Rating: (11K votes)
“Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women.”
“Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember―the enemy's gate is down.
If you step through your own door like you're out for a stroll, you're a big target and you deserve to get hit. With more than a flasher.”
“The univers is statistically more likely to be ironic than not,”
“You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it's all going to lead.”
“We're all tools in somebody's kit. But that doesn't mean we can't make tools out o other people. Or figure our interesting things to use ourselves for.”
“He could just look at people and listen to them and suddenly he'd know things about them.”
“He did what he thought was right,”
“saying you don't know or care about God is the same as saying you believe he doesn't exist, because if you had even a hope that he existed, you would care very much.”
“Didn't Jesus say something disparaging about casting pearls before swine?”
“He was getting to the point that he didn't understand why tax attorneys didn't just kill themselves.”
“There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.”
“And Americans always think international laws are for other people anyway,”
“Not that science is particularly pure, except compared to politics.”
“When Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson -- the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father -- Les, as he'll be called hereafter -- dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation -- in my view, at least -- was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les -- as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.”
“And the fifth year was the year they discovered the giant boulder at the edge of the playing field, behind which the recess teacher couldn’t see what was happening.
It was the year of their first kiss—or kisses, rather—there one and only foray into romance with each other. They tried it once with their lips closed tightly, a small quick peck, and then again, they tried it by touching their tongues together. The sensation was slippery, supple, and foreign. They both immediately agreed that it was gross and swore they would never do it again.”
“I never heerd...nor read of nor see in picters, any angel in tights and gaiters...but...he's a reg'lar thoroughbred angel for all that.”
“How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.”
“Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”
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