Orson Scott Card

"He exuded confidence without ever looking as if he wanted to make sure everyone else knew how confident he was."

"How does he do it? How does he master people without bluster or bullying? How does he make people fear him or love him, not in spite of his ruthlessness but because of it?"

"The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered."

"He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them."

"He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more."

"They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"In his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and lead you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way Ill be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the presence of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. Thats what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me."

"Something had been given back to him. And because [she] had been a part of it, there was something between them now. A bond of loss, if loss could bind."

"If it isnt a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?"

"He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust."

"How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?"

"A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it."