1,174 Quotes by Orson Scott Card

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.

If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.