Orson Scott Card · 464 pages
Rating: (22.3K votes)
“Eko brushed a tear from her eye, and Immo jeered at her, but father held up a hand. "Never mock a tender heart," he said.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“We've decided that your birthday present will be a car", said Marion.
Danny was touched. "But the thing I can't figure out is, why would I need a new car?"
"You can't very well gate a girl to the movies, Danny," Leslie replied.
"I think you're overlooking the biggest point here," said Danny. "I don't need a CAR so I can date. I need a GIRL.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“What could go wrong... Doing some stupid impulsive thing that caused the death of drowthers was practically a family tradition.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“He knew he could always be smart later, if that turned out to be a better strategy. But once you admitted to being smart, there was no going back.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“The other four houses yielded jewelry, wallets, credit cards, laptops, iPads and Kindles, even a couple of expensive looking vases....
"You didn't do anything stupid like writing IOUs and signing your name, did you?"
"That's an excellent idea," said Danny. He stepped back through the gate, waited for a count of five, and then returned to Eric. Now Eric was standing, and when he saw Danny he visibly sagged with relief. "What kind of moron are you?"
"The fun-loving kind," said Danny. "I'm not an idiot, of course I didn't sign my name to IOUs."
"Good."
"I signed yours.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they’re workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we’re on the right track.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“He was always just mad enough to take treaties seriously. Honor, you know. I don't have any.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“Computers were a kind of magery in themselves, or might as well be - to people who didn't understand them, they were every bit as inscrutable.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“Love and serve the sources of your strength.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“And you're the one who thought it was too risky to go through a gate."
"That's why we're such a great team," said Eric, "We're both completely stupid about different things.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“Danny North grew up surrounded by fairies, ghosts, talking animals, living stones, walking trees, and gods who called up wind and brought down rain, made fire from air and drew iron out of the depths of the earth as easily as ordinary people might draw up water from a well.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“Or maybe laughter was how they pushed painful memories out of their minds. Perhaps laughter was the only way they could keep from killing each other.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“He understood all the words, he just had no clue what was going on. The Aunts said what they meant. Or at least they meant what they said.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“Darlin', said Leslie, 'everybody on earth stays alive day to day solely because everyone they meet decides, every single day, not to kill them...”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“Good, that's settled then,' said Danny. 'Since I'm the idiot who set this all in motion by playing around with the rope-climb in a high school gym, I apologize right now for everything that goes wrong with this. With any luck, I'm the only one who gets zapped in the outself, and everything else goes on like normal for the rest of you. But if terrible things happen, please remember that I meant well, and that I did my best. That is what I promise you”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Lost Gate - Shadow of the Hegemon
“People who repress desires
often turn, suddenly,
into hypocrites.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
“Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal.
We need to have pastors who are schooled in apologetics and engaged intellectually with our culture so as to shepherd their flock amidst the wolves.
People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true.
God could not possibly have intended that reason should be the faculty to lead us to faith, for faith cannot hang indefinitely in suspense while reason cautiously weighs and reweighs arguments. The Scriptures teach, on the contrary, that the way to God is by means of the heart, not by means of the intellect.
When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem. Sometimes an unbeliever will throw up an intellectual smoke screen so that he can avoid personal, existential involvement with the gospel. In such a case, further argumentation may be futile and counterproductive, and we need to be sensitive to moments when apologetics is and is not appropriate.
A person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit’s witness, but it does not serve as the basis of his belief.
As long as reason is a minister of the Christian faith, Christians should employ it.
It should not surprise us if most people find our apologetic unconvincing. But that does not mean that our apologetic is ineffective; it may only mean that many people are closed-minded.
Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong.
No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless.
We are witnesses to a mighty struggle for the mind and soul of America in our day, and Christians cannot be indifferent to it.
If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm.
God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed.
Because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies.”
― William Lane Craig, quote from Reasonable Faith
“Un gran escritor no es más que un escritor. La diferencia es de matiz, no de raíz. Todos los saltadores de altura saltan, digamos, dos metros. Si uno salta dos metros y cinco centímetros, ya es un gran deportista. No, no merece la pena fatigarse siquiera con la idea de llegar a ser un pobre gran escritor, un desdichado escritor genial. Coge los mejores libros escritos jamás. Apenas son algo mejores que los libros mediocres. Todos son fundamentalmente libros nada más. Te proporcionarán, cuando los leas, un placer estético algo más intenso. Como un café un poco más dulce. Los soltarás al cabo de treinta páginas para prepararte un bocadillo o para ir al baño. Los leerás a la vez que quién sabe qué novela policiaca. Dentro de unos miles de años también ellos serán tierra y polvo. En estas condiciones, que tú, un ser al que se le ha concedido la oportunidad disparatada de existir y de reflexionar sobre el mundo, te propongas llegar a ser tan solo un genio es humillante, es ínfimo. Es como si abandonaras todo y te internaras de nuevo en el bosque. En cada individuo hay posibilidades ante las cuales la ambición de ser el escritor más importante de todos los tiempos es simplemente denigrante por su simplicidad. Porque ¿qué milagro es importante comparado con el de existir y de saber que existes? De aquí hasta ser el hombre más rico, el más poderoso, el más ingenioso del mundo es como pasar de un billón a un billón uno, incluso menos. No, no quiero llegar a ser un gran escritor, quiero llegar a ser Todo. Sueño sin cesar con un creador que, a través de su arte, llegue a influir de verdad en la vida de las personas, de todas las personas, y después en la vida de las personas, de todas la personas, y después en la vida del universo, hasta las estrellas más lejanas, hasta el final del espacio y del tiempo. Y que a continuación sustituya al universo, que se convierta él mismo en el Mundo. Sólo así creo que podría un hombre, un artista, cumplir su misión. El resto es literatura, una colección de trucos mejor o peor dominados, trozos de papel emborronados con brea por los que nadie da un real, por muy geniales que sean esas líneas de signos que, dentro de poco ni siquiera serán comprendidas.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, quote from Nostalgia
“Don't worry, Mrs. Colder. For the most part, we keep him leashed and gagged. We only let him free when the cute little animal jokes are needed.
~Sherra Callahan (on Kane Tyler)~”
― Lora Leigh, quote from Elizabeth's Wolf
“Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying”
― David Sheff, quote from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
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.