“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“If you give orders and explain nothing, you might get obedience, but you'll get no creativity. If you tell them your purpose, then when your original plan is shown to be faulty, they'll find another way to achieve your goal. Explaining to your men doesn't weaken their respect for you, it proves your respect for them.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they're telling the truth, there's always something hidden behind their words.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“You don't want to give God the credit because you don't think he exists. But if you're going to blame him for all the crap, kid, you got to give him credit for what grows from that fertilized soil.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“The child is mine and Petra's. It's especially important to us because it's the first we know of that definitely does not have my condition."
"You mean it isn't ugly?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“So the I.F. is spying on Earth."
"Just as a mother spies on her children at play in the yard."
"Good to know you're looking out for us, Mummy.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Mine mine mine. That was the curse and power of human beings—that what they saw and loved they had to have. They could share it with other people but only if they conceived of those people as being somehow their own. What we own is ours. What you own should also be ours. In fact, you own nothing, if we want it. Because you are nothing. We are the real people, you are only posing as people in order to try to deprive us of what God means us to have.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“What about this? A colony of nothing but Battle School grads. If they bred true, they'd be the smartest military minds in the galaxy.
Then they'd come home and take over Earth.
OK, not that.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are and go ahead and LEAD.
-Petra”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“the cruelest, narrowest, most evil people will always rise to power because they'll always be the ones most willing to wrap themselves in the crescent flag and murder people in God's name.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“That's the problem with Peter," said Theresa.
"Only the one?" said Peter.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“It was an unbroken network of causality leading back to the first human who wasn't a chimp. And farther back, to the coalescing of the planets around the sun. If you wish to call that God, go ahead.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“You're not crazy. You're not evil. But you can't stop.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“The emotion she could deal with best was anger.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Like Santa Claus. You adults pretend he doesn't exist, but we know that he really does.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Since I don't have actual authority over anybody, Petra, how can it possibly matter if I'm not legitimately authorized?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they’re telling the truth, there’s always something hidden behind their words.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Pero la naturaleza de los subordinados era usar el poder de manera intrépida, ya que la culpa siempre podía achacarse tanto a los de abajo como a los de arriba.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“—Así que nos convertimos en lo que necesitamos ser.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Dar explicaciones a tus hombres no mengua el respeto que sienten por ti, sino que demuestra tu respeto por ellos.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“Porque los que llegan a la cima en un imperio son los intrigantes, los asesinos o los señores de la guerra.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
“It’s like communes—people with nothing are always willing to share.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Giant
Orson Scott Card
Born place: in Richland, Washington, The United States
Born date August 24, 1951
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“I continued working without a break, but in the middle of the third story...I felt myself tiring more than if I had been working on a novel. The same thing happened with the fourth. In fact, I did not have the energy to finish them. Now I know why: The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine, and if the rest of one's life is not spent correcting the novel, it is because the same iron rigor needed to begin the book is required to end it. But a story has no beginning, no end: Either it works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, my own experience, and the experience of others, shows that most of the time it is better for one's health to start again in another direction, or toss the story in the wastebasket. Someone, I don't remember who, made the point with this comforting phrase: "Good writers are appreciated more for what they tear up than for what they publish.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Strange Pilgrims
“We have to keep reminding ourselves that we have to stop, or we never will.”
― Jasinda Wilder, quote from Falling into Us
“We are all pretenders in life, finding a patch of humanity that we relate to, and then embrace it. We come straight down the birth canal and our parents start telling us who to be, simply by being themselves. We see their lives, their cars, the way they interact, the rules they set, and the foundations for our own lives are laid. And when our parents aren’t molding us, our situations are. We are all sheep, who get jobs, and have babies, and diet, and try to carve something special out for ourselves using the broken hearts, and bored minds, and scathed souls life delivered to us. And it’s all been done before, every bit of suffering, every joy.
And the minute you realize that we are all pretenders is the minute everything stops intimidating you: punishment, and failure, and death. Even people. There is nothing so ingenious about another human who has pretended well. They are, in fact, just another soul, perhaps more clever, better at failing than you are. But not worth a second of intimidation.”
― Tarryn Fisher, quote from Marrow
“Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.”
― Yaa Gyasi, quote from Homegoing
“Every crime like this needs someone like me to look away and say nothing.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, quote from The White Darkness
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