Orson Scott Card Quotes on Family
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How could he not know that children had minds of their own, and resisted taming?
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Marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman; even the beasts cleave together and produce their young. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman on one side and their community on the other
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Don't condescend to me mother But Quim, it seems so natural, considering how you always condescend to me
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That's right. I want all the secrets opened up. I want all the files unlocked. I don't want anything hidden You don't know what you're asking. You don't know how much pain it will cause if all the secrets come out Take a look at my family. How can the truth cause anymore pain than the secrets have already caused?
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She might be protective and possessive with her children whom she thought of as needing her, but with the people she needed, she was the opposite. If she feared they would be taken from her, she withdrew from them; she stopped permitting herself to need them.
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I thought: if I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to a mother to the children, their whole lives, what [he] was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.
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I've always loved you. But no woman in her right mind would ever marry you and have your babies because NOBODY COULD STAND TO RAISE THEM. You will have the most hellish children. So have them in a colony where there'll be somplace for them to go when they run away from home about fifteen times before they're ten.
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Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too.
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Any unhappiness that they might harbor in their hearts was kept in check, buried under the hard work that marked the rhythms of their lives, and then dissolved in the moments when joy was bountiful and love unstinted
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Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are.
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Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then.
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You were such a promising boy. Of all the tragedies this lifelong war between brothers has caused, you are the saddest one of all
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We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts
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Does a son betray his father? If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?
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Children are nothing but tools of their parents
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We've seen the worst that men can do, pa, and been the worst that men can be. But that don't mean that someday we wont see the best, too. And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can still be pretty good, can't we?
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Was she being ironic? Vanya had never been able to guess about mother
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You're not losing me, mother. I'm in love. I never had you, not since you escaped from the womb
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More than likely, mother would simply go enigmatic on him, give him one of her inscrutable smiles, and tell him that if he didn't already understand, he never would
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Esther tuned out their conversation and thought about Vanya, about how strange it was that this other woman, this girl-child, should speak of her son so possessively, should speak of his future as if it were her own future
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There was majesty in the child, and only banality in this marriage:marriage is about banality. Its purpose is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace. What do I want for him, a troublesome, restless woman? A queen?
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Some memories don't fade, some physical memories are forever. The feel of your fathers hand, the sound of your mothers voice. Only, father's hand was smaller now. No, Ivan's was larger, but to him, it was his father who had shrunk, who no longer had the power of the giant, of the god, to enfold him and keep him safe.
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I don't like the thought of you being married to a woman who always thinks she married down That's a problem isn't it? But the truth is, she did No. No, that's not true. There is no woman alive who, marrying you, would be marrying down I thought - that's a thing that mother would say Yes. Mothers say things like that more than fathers do
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I trust you because I've come to know you, and coming to know you, I've learned to love you. I've fallen in love with your boldness, your humility, your innocence, your kindness, your willingness. I know that you will stand by me as best you can. But you don't know what my husband needs to know. You can't do what my husband needs to do. I can trust your heart, your king's heart, but your mind doesn't know what it needs to know, your hands don't have in them the skills they need to have. I had no choice but to marry you. But little by little I have come to long for you to include me within the circle of your arms, of your mind, of your pure love. To embrace me, to give me babies I was born to have, to help me raise them. And I don't care which world we raise them in, yours or mine or some other we haven't seen yet
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Your mother surrounds you every moment,' she said. 'I know, because I feel her love for you in my own arms, around you now.
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Right, of course, you're the only person in history who is completely immune to her religious upbringing.
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Rage at the death of his daughter and all the things that had gone wrong and the people who had screwed up. He needed to kill somebody, to tear them apart, only there wasn't anybody to kill.
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That's right, hide from me, that's mature of you. Don't face up to anything. Isn't that what your life in this house is all about? Hiding!
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I'm not your daughter! I'm not your sister! I'm not your anything!
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We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again
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If I don't do anything that also ruins lives Beginning with your own Maybe Because you need children. Don't you? I don't know if I could ever do that again. Now that I know what it does to you when you lose one. Is it worse than losing a parent? Yes Worse than losing yourself? I've never lost myself
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Why you sad about that? She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me
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They're going to be a bunch of little jerks, because that's the way kids are at that age, except you, because you were born not knowing how to hurt anybody else, you were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You wont understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you
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[Her] love for the girls was real, and they had always adored this strange creature who had no children to love but them
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I'm hungry and thirsty No, I'm hungry and thirsty No, me. I said it first No, me did they really think that only one of them would be permitted to eat?
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What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult. So please do keep on shielding her from any chance of ever becoming a mature, productive, empathic human being... I knew that was a facet of your life when I married you. But don't you dare to accuse me of being envious of the sickness that you call motherlove.
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It's all right to love him I know that I mean, it's all right to love him more than you love us. More than you love any of us. More than you love all of us
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The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes
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All children are manipulators
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Grownup men don't share their lives with their sisters, they share them with their wives
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He had an overdeveloped sense of empathy. He could imagine other peoples suffering, and felt it himself. His mother had used that against him all his life, torturing him with guilt for all the suffering of her life
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He saw that he was young, but he did not hold it against himself. He also saw that he was happy, but he did not wish that he still felt that way. He remembered too well the pain of discovering how foolish he had been. He saw himself more as father had seen him, as a boy on a path of years, echoing childhood with every move, promising manhood also.
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A house of your own soon enough It was this house I wanted to belong in. He hates me now,, and ill never have a chance again to make it right Give him time to see you as a man on your own, and he'll come around, you'll see. Now me. He wont forgive me. I look too much like grandfather, don't you see? I never had a chance here
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I never knew I love father till he lay there at the brink of death. Perhaps I never did love him, until he was nearly gone. It seemed a very powerful thought, until it occurred to him that justice probably put it into his mind
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People aren't individuals, even though we all think we are. Even before I came, what did you know of yourself, except what your family told you? Their tales of your childhood became your vision of yourself; you imitated your father and mother both, learned what it means to be a human being from them. Every pattern of your life has been bent and shaped by what other people do and what other people say
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Children of the Mind