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81 " Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message? "
― Orson Scott Card
82 " My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you. "
― Orson Scott Card , Heartfire (Tales of Alvin Maker, #5)
83 " That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes. "
― Orson Scott Card , Hidden Empire (Empire, #2)
84 " It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart. "
― Orson Scott Card , Ender in Exile (Ender's Saga, #5)
85 " I cut the wood however I like, but it's the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn't just your memory that makes you who you are. There's something in the grain of the mind. "
― Orson Scott Card , The Worthing Saga (Worthing, #1-3)
86 " Panem et Circenses translates into 'Bread and Circuses.' The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power. "
― Orson Scott Card , Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1)
87 " When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes. "
― Orson Scott Card , Speaker for the Dead (Ender's Saga, #2)
88 " Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment. "
― Orson Scott Card , Empire (Empire, #1)
89 " Stories are invented as you go along... "
90 " While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights. "
91 " Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender's Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. ... _Ender's Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way ... are going to find _Ender's Game_ a very unpleasant place to live. "
92 " Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore. "
93 " I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. "
94 " But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus. "
95 " We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction. "
96 " Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction. "
97 " There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever. "
98 " The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow. "
99 " As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday. "
― Orson Scott Card , Earth Unaware (The First Formic War, #1)
100 " A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war. "