Quotes from Prentice Alvin

Orson Scott Card ·  342 pages

Rating: (16.2K votes)


“He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Prentice Alvin


“I'm just saying things never get so bad we can't do something to make them better.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Prentice Alvin


“The bigger a man is, the more people he serves,” said the Prophet. “A small man serves himself. Bigger is to serve your family. Bigger is to serve your tribe. Then your people. Biggest of all, to serve all men, and all lands.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Prentice Alvin


“Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that's the way of the world, the best way.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Prentice Alvin


“Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Prentice Alvin



“[H]e had come to work for what the fee could buy, and not for joy of the work itself.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Prentice Alvin


About the author

Orson Scott Card
Born place: in Richland, Washington, The United States
Born date August 24, 1951
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Животът изисква да го живеем до непоносимост.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from Pilgrim


“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King


“Logan pulls out a chair at the table and motions for me to sit. But I suddenly feel little fingers tugging on the legs of my jeans. I look down at Hayley, who blinks her pretty blue eyes at me. Hayley is three, and we spent some time together when I was here before. “Welcome home,” she says. I set my pizza on the counter and reach for her. “Oh my goodness,” I breathe as I bend down and pick her up. She wraps herself around me and holds me close. She lets me go and whispers in my ear. “Are you staying for good?” She chews on her finger as she waits. “I’m staying forever and ever.” I am. I’m never leaving again, no matter what. Anything else we need, we can work out as a family. This ragtag bunch of boys and Hayley are as much a family to me as my parents are right now—they’re home. I set Hayley on the edge of the counter and cut a piece of cake for her. Her eyes gleam, and she smiles sheepishly at her father. “Food first,” Paul warns. I stick a fork in the cake and take a big bite, and then hold a smaller forkful out for her. Paul scrunches his brow and says, “Fine. One bite.” He holds up a finger in warning. Hayley grins, and I feed her the cake.”
― quote from Smart, Sexy and Secretive


“One of the layers was old hurts. How had he managed to bury that? She knew a lot about old hurts, and just how hard they were to keep down in the cellar of things. He didn’t wear his wounds as a point of pride, and many did. He might brood over them from time to time, and she appreciated a good brood herself. But he didn’t appear to let those old wounds, those old scars run his life. On”
― Nora Roberts, quote from High Noon


“There's people in hell who want ice water.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


Interesting books

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
(3K)
Marie Antoinette: Th...
by Stefan Zweig
Blood Bound
(6.2K)
Blood Bound
by Rachel Vincent
Counterpoint
(3K)
Counterpoint
by Rachel Haimowitz
Chasing Magic
(5K)
Chasing Magic
by Stacia Kane
The Dead
(12.8K)
The Dead
by James Joyce
In a Heartbeat
(3.6K)
In a Heartbeat
by Loretta Ellsworth

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.