Orson Scott Card

He was telling the truth, the story you wouldn't think to doubt because it’s taken for granted.

It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, now she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.

I understood that she didn’t want to be liked. As if she were a visitor who expected to go back home any day.

My, but I miss the days when we never talked to each other for weeks at a time.

These people came for entertainment, but they're your targets; you will pierce them to the hearts.

We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe.

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant.

Once you know what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

It’s the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: to grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways, though, to fulfill it. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, Only I will be great, and to make room for me the rest of you must give up even what you already have, and become nothing.

Ignorance and deception can’t save anybody. Knowing saves them.

[They] knew each other so well that there was often nothing to say. But without her there, [he] grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to.

I think you can’t possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them.