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328 results · Page 6 of 14Play this collection ▷
04c. 1951 AD
I wonder sometimes if I'm not, after all, a piece in some other player's game, following blindly his grand designs without ever knowing that my path along the board is only a feint, while the important matters are played out elsewhere by other men. But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: To see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done, then the price, one paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value. Here among the shepherds, my cup is filled with the water of life; it overflows.
Orson Scott Card / quote
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05c. 1951 AD
Hive Queen: So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them.Human: You don’t believe in God?Hive Queen: The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began.Human: You evolved. We were created.Hive Queen: By a virus.Human: By a virus that God created in order to create us.Hive Queen: So you, too, are a believer.Human: I understand belief.Hive Queen: No—you desire belief.Human: I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that’s what faith is.Hive Queen: Or deliberate insanity.
Orson Scott Card / quote
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08c. 1951 AD
He splashed into the water, his whole body, not with the reverent attitude of prayer, but with a desperate thirst; he buried his head under the water and drank deep, with his cheek against the cold stone of the riverbed, the water tumbling over his back, his calves. He drank and drank, lifted his head and shoulders above the water to gasp in the evening air, and then collapsed into the water again, to drink as greedily as before.It was a kind of prayer, though, he realized as he emerged, freezing cold as the water evaporated from his skin in the breeze of the dark morning.I am with you, he said to the Oversoul. I'll do whatever you ask, because I long for you to accomplish your purpose here.
Orson Scott Card / quote
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22c. 1951 AD
Achilles might be a good papa to the family, but he was also a killer, and he never forgives.Poke knew that, though. Bean warned her, and she knew it, but she chose Achilles for their papa anyway. Chose him and then died for it. She was like that Jesus that Helga preached about in her kitchen while they ate. She died for her people. And Achilles, he was like God. He made people pay for their sins no matter what they did.The important thing is, stay on the good side of God. That's what Helga teaches, isn't it? Stay right with God.I'll stay right with Achilles. I'll honor my papa, that's for sure, so I can stay alive until I'm old enough to go out on my own.
Orson Scott Card / quote
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23c. 1951 AD
So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.
Orson Scott Card / quote
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