Orson Scott Card on Life

"“Our savior will resurrect us,” said Peggy, “but I haven’t noticed that Christians end up any less dead at the end of life than heathens."

"We are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics."

"Living with a god is not what it's cracked up to be. They think their women should be grateful just to have them around."

"It was always from the love of strong women that he had found whatever joy had been granted him in his life."

"Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price."

"I've learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it’s occupied by someone with a good heart."

"His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life."

"The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes."

"What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!"

"He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends."

"Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people."

"Perhaps I’m hiding from myself. Perhaps I don’t want to be what I’m supposed to be. Or perhaps I don’t want to keep living the life I already started to live."

"You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me."

"Why did people get so upset when somebody mentioned dying? Did they think that if they didn’t mention it, it would skip a few people and leave them alive forever?"

"How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?"

"You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else."

"I don't know you, ma'am, and apparently I'm expected to die for you."

"You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven’t died yet."

"“I don’t plan to die for any cause,” said Jim Bowie. “Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain’t noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me."

"The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second."

"How short life is for fools."

"Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn’t understand what real badness was."

"There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore."

"Deep inside himself, in a place he didn't often go, where he kept the things he didn't like to think about but dared not forget, he knew that was still alive somewhere, and somehow she was watching what he did, or at least looking in on him from time to time."

"Every terrible thing in the world was caused by a whole combination of things. But everybody wanted to narrow it down to one cause—and not even the real one. Much better to have one cause—one person to punish. Then the unbearable could be borne."

"I think if you left grownups to do what they really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone."

"He was only six, but he already knew that he hated it when he had to do what other people wanted, even when he knew that they were wrong. He didn’t want to be a soldier. He didn’t want to kill. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to obey stupid people."

"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."

"They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer."

"I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts... And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else."