Orson Scott Card - People Quotes

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The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

Orson Scott Card
Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!

Orson Scott Card
We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again.

Orson Scott Card
We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.

Orson Scott Card
Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

Orson Scott Card
"I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them."
"A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed."

Orson Scott Card
People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else.

Orson Scott Card
There's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing.

Orson Scott Card
You are not what you seem.
So many people have said that that I'm beginning to think that's precisely how I do seem. What is it I seem to be that you have now discovered that I'm not?

Orson Scott Card
What Alvin figured out was that when you're Making, you don't use people like tools. You don't wear them out to achieve your purpose. You wear yourself out helping them achieve theirs. You wear yourself out teaching and guiding, persuading and listening to advice and letting folks persuade you, when it happens they're right.

Orson Scott Card
An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

Orson Scott Card
To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.

Orson Scott Card
Oh, Val," said Father. "All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be happier." "No greatness, then." "Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day." "Not in the history books," said Valentine. "Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.

Orson Scott Card
And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

Orson Scott Card
I don't know why people who got what they need to be happy don't just go ahead and be happy.

Orson Scott Card
There were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.

Orson Scott Card
Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist.
Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.

Orson Scott Card
That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.

Orson Scott Card
How does he do it? How does he master people without bluster or bullying? How does he make people fear him or love him, not in spite of his ruthlessness but because of it?

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
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

Orson Scott Card
When you have faith in something a lot of other people believe then you a member of the church" said Ceas, "When you have faith in something nobody believes, then you a complete wacko

Orson Scott Card
I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people.

Orson Scott Card
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

Orson Scott Card
You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.

Orson Scott Card
People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue - this is what will endear him to the locals.

Orson Scott Card
Don't you think it's ironic that you have no idea what you're supposed to do, said Verily, and yet so many people have gone to so much trouble to prevent you from doing it?

Orson Scott Card
Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.

Orson Scott Card
You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.
So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person.

Orson Scott Card
This is the Speaker for the Dead? Judging someone by appearances?" "Maybe I've fallen in love with Grego." "You've always been a sucker for people who pee on you.

Orson Scott Card