Orson Scott Card - Man Quotes

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Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too.

Orson Scott Card
Road poured out into a place of meadows and a few White man's buildings. Lots of wagons. Horses posted and tied, grazing on the meadow grass. Sounds of metal hammers ringing, chopping of axes in the wood, screech of saws going back and forth, all kinds of White-man forest-killing sounds. A White man's town.

Orson Scott Card
What is the White man? What does he do?
The White man is like a human being, but he crushes all other living things under his feet.
Then why, O Ta-Kumsaw, when I look into your heart, why is it that you do not wish to hurt the White man, that you do not wish to kill the White man?
The White man doesn't know the evil that he does. The White man doesn't feel the peace of the land, so how can he tell the little deaths he makes? I can't blame the White man. But I can't let him stay. So when I make him leave this land, I won't hate him.

Orson Scott Card
What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult.

Orson Scott Card
Nafai knew the rule: when a man acts like a child, he's boyish, and everyone's delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he's childish, and everyone tells him to be a man.

Orson Scott Card
The White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man's way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn't need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.

Orson Scott Card
What the White man had won with so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but the corpse of that land. It was decay that the White man won. It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it.

Orson Scott Card
When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.

Orson Scott Card
A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him.

Orson Scott Card
I don't hold with prophets, said Alvin. Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.

Orson Scott Card
We don't go to Fort Chicago, said Ta-Kumsaw. We go to the holy place.
A church? asked Alvin.
Ta-Kumsaw laughed. You White people, when you make a place holy you build walls so nothing of the land can get in. Your god is nothing and nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that could be anywhere, it doesn't matter—nothing and nowhere.
Well what does make a place holy? asked Alvin.
Because that's where the Red man talks to the land, and the land answers.

Orson Scott Card
And I says back to him, Calvin, sounding like an educated man don't make you educated, and he says back to me, I'd rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant, and I said, Why? and he says to me, Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.

Orson Scott Card
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
No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him.

Orson Scott Card
This is today's puzzle, he said. If the act of denial can be taken as proof of the crime, how can an innocent man defend himself?
The tithingmen caught him by the arms. Come along now, Mr. Emerson, and don't go trying any philosophy on us.
Oh, I wouldn't dream of it, said Waldo. Philosophy would be wasted against such sturdy-headed men as you.
Glad you know it, said the tithingman proudly. Wouldn't want you thinking we weren't true Christians.

Orson Scott Card
Taleswapper looked at Miller.
I'm nothing, he said.
A Christian isn't nothing, said Taleswapper.
I'm no Christian, either.
Ah, said Taleswapper. A Deist, then, like Tom Jefferson. The children murmured at his mention of the great man's name.
Taleswapper, I'm a father who loves his children, a husband who loves his wife, a farmer who pays his debts, and a miller without a millstone.

Orson Scott Card
If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe.

Orson Scott Card
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
This is Alvin Smith, said Cooper. He's a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.

Orson Scott Card
You're such a liar.
But I'm a beautiful liar, don't you think? She flashed her best smile at her friend.
I don't understand what men see in women anyway, her friend answered. Hexes or no hexes, as long as a woman has her clothes on a man can't see what he's interested in anyhow.

Orson Scott Card
My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.

Orson Scott Card
Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I'm old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.

Orson Scott Card
Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife.

Orson Scott Card
It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.

Orson Scott Card