13 Orson Scott Card Quotes on Guilt

Orson Scott Card quotes on guilt

14. Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we'll be drinking Bonzo's blood water in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.

82. [This] isn't my home [she] felt his words like an accusation: you rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it's not my fault, she wanted to answer - you're the one who's leaving, not me.

122. When someone dies, a loved one, and your last contact with them was angry or spiteful, then you begin to blame yourself. If only I hadn't said this, if only I hadn't said that.

138. I carry the seeds of death with me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.

142. He had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality.

338. I believed in my own heart that it was necessary. But I also hated him. Will I ever be sure that I didn't do it because of that hatred, that longing for vengeance? I fear that I will always suspect that I am an assassin in my heart.

628. She knew exactly what she had done to him. And yet she couldn't quite believe that she was jerking him around

649. I couldn't bear to go out there and ... Be alive. When I had killed her.

665. Don't it ever occur to you that only good people are afraid of paying for their sins?' No ma'am. I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts.. And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else

890. There was no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, between those whose deaths achieved no purpose and those who had to die if mankind on treason was to mean anything

891. For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longer to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done

907. We haven't the power to change men's hearts. We're not responsible. It isn't our fault. Your hands are clean aren't they? Out here where the sun keeps everything pure. But you're not pure! Because if you could stop the suffering and dying, and didn't stop it, the you are guilty. It is your fault. We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them

1018. 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