Orson Scott Card

I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.

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.

Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.

That's the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own.

“I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,

And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door,

So I turned to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

“I don’t hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.”

It's plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated.

She grunted. “Nothing unusual?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you ask me, that’s pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.”

They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

“I was ordained,” said the preacher. “No one ordains artists. They ordain themselves.”

Just as Taleswapper had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter.