Orson Scott Card on Knowledge

"Just because you know I had no other choice doesn't make the anger go away. I understand that. But you're a man now. You can put away these childish things."

"I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked."

"Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?"

"They don't know how to watch things. They don't know how to see anything but what they expect to see."

"That’s how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don’t bother hardly getting to know each other at all."

"You think my apology means I'm weak. But it doesn't. It means I am trying to learn how to be strong."

"“You must be a prophet right enough,” said Alvin Junior, “cause I can’t understand a thing you said."

"I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew."

"It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies."

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

"He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them."

"She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me."

"“Lookit that,” he said. “A lawyer who knows how to do something useful. That’s a miracle."

"Adolescents never understand that the best way to avoid notice is to behave normally."

"More than likely, mother would simply go enigmatic on him, give him one of her inscrutable smiles, and tell him that if he didn't already understand, he never would."

"Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance."

"Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?"

"I don't know a soul who doesn't maintain two separate lists of doctrines — the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by."

"You are mine, but you are not mine. I am yours, but you hardly know it."

"Didn’t he know that when you work to destroy, you invite the Destroyer?"

"A man who can’t read only knows what other folks tell him."

"Knowing was better than not knowing. But not by much."

"He didn’t know if he had the right or not. Didn’t know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill."

"Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism."

"You can’t change what you don’t understand."

"Very bad thing, killing little boy. But maybe Red man knows about whisky-Red, very thirsty, making crazy. Not like killing man to take his house or his woman or his land, like White man all the time."

"Verily learned to live with constant deception, hiding what he was and what he saw and what he felt and what he did from everyone around him. It was only natural that he should be drawn to the study of law."

"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."

"Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn’t quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?"

"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."