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"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."
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"A child's best friend is often the one telling bedtime stories."

"Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence."

"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."

"It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them."

"And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes."

"Their suburbia house in Brentwood' was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need."

"We were still children and residing in the mosque from morning to evening. We were about to turn into monsters."

"It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?"
Explore more quotes by Orson Scott Card

"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."

"The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together."

"Someone's senta loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing streama gain I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays up."

"I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!"

"If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society."

"Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I."

"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."

"My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man."When the planting's done," I said."Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.""Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left."

"He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow."
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