Orson Scott Card on Family

"You really are children. You have no idea how power works, or who has it, or what you can actually do with it."

"Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then."

"Like all children they only wanted to be known, and cared little about giving that gift to others."

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

"How strange it was that this other woman, this girl-child, should speak of her son so possessively, should speak of his future as if it were her own future."

"If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?"

"In Vanya's family, silence had never meant surrender, only tactical retreat."

"Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice."

"Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are."

"Marriage is about banality. Its purpose is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace."

"All children are manipulators."

"Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart: you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning."

"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."

"First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left?"

"And he wanted a wife. He wanted to raise children. He wanted to prove that goodness wasn’t beaten into children, that fear was not the fount from which virtue flowed. He wanted to be able to gather his family in his arms and know that not one of them dreaded the sight of him, or felt the need to lie to him in order to have his love."