Orson Scott Card Quotes on Identity
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The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
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A strange thing happened then. The speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgment was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply speaking her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn't a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.
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At first he thought he felt bad because he was afraid of leading an army, but it wasn't true. He knew he'd make a good commander. He felt himself wanting to cry. He hadn't cried since the first few days of homesickness after he got here. He tried to put a name on the feeling that put a lump in his throat and made him sob silently, however much he tried to hold it down. He bit down on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It didn't help.
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I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.
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Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
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His accent made him exotic and interesting; his broken arm made him a martyr; his sadism made him a natural focus for all those who loved pain in others.
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We don't think like other children, do we...? We don't talk like other children. And above all, we don't write like other children.
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Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that's so.
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He was a solider, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.
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So you chose not to be part of the bands of children who group together for the sole purpose of excluding others, and people look at you and say, poor girl, she's so isolated, but you know a secret, you know who you really are. You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there's never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapien:
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In your judgment I have no one else's judgment to use
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She's your other self. Will you really leave her for us?
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Life, so long waited for, and not until today could she be sure that she would be, not the last of her tribe, but the first.
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Are you ready to reveal yourself to the rest of humanity? I've always been ready. The question is, are they ready to know me?
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Is it possible she had lost her soul inside his?
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We pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive.
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I think you were always pretending. Maybe you even fooled yourself. But one thing is certain. You were never an ordinary girl, and you could never had lead an ordinary life.
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Only you have the power to kill me completely. Only you have the power to make it so my death means nothing, so that all my people die after me and there is no one left to remember. Why shouldn't I leave my testament with you alone? Only you will decide whether or not it has any worth.
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Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?
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I'm not interested in my own life anymore. Do you understand? The only life I care about in the world is yours. If I lose you, what is there to hold me here?
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I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two. The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew. The changeless part was always true, the growing part was always new, and I wondered, when the tale was through, which part was me, and which was you.
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[He], who was a stranger in every land, belonging nowhere, serving everywhere, until he chose this world as his home, not just because there was a family that needed him, but also because in this place he did not have to be entirely a member of the human race... He could be part of something larger than mere humanity
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It was as if Graff had read his heart and found the lie that would penetrate most deeply into his soul and told it to him.
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I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be, Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are, and go ahead and LEAD.
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Is this earth? So beautiful and monstrous? Is this what we were?
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Is that who I am? A boy who is so weak that he can't imagine loving a woman who is strong?
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I only exist in this place. I am only human in this place.
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You know nothing about me at all. Which is almost certainly true. I know nothing about you. No one knows anything about you.
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Will I be coming to you as husband or a child? A partner or a student?
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That was all she needed - was for him to tell her he didn't expect her to be the waterseer all the time, that he was marrying the fragile, imperfect human being, and not the overpowering image she inadvertently put on.
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Show him who I am, help him to see that even though I am no beauty, I'm still a woman, I still long to love, to be loved, to make a family with a man who is bound into my heart
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I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female. Don't you ever tell me again that just because I don't act like a woman wants me to act, that makes me an animal.
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People are what they want to be
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He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends
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Humans feel compassion primarily for those they conceive of as being part of themselves
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Humans had to evolve what no other primate had: a sense of identity with a group so powerful that it could swallow up the individual identity, at least to a large degree. Humans couldn't have the deep, self-sacrificing loyalty to more than one or two communities at a time. Thus communities were inevitably in conflict with each other, competing for the loyalty of their members. The tribe had to break down the solidarity of the family; religion had to compete with nation for loyalty. But once a community had that loyalty, the most ardent members would gladly die for it. Not for the other individuals directly, but for the interests of the group as a whole, because in the human mind, that group was the self, and the individual was able to regard himself as merely one iteration of the pattern of the whole
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Everything I ever felt myself to be a part of is dead
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He would know what was right. Yet with his marvelous gift of knowing right from wrong, why couldn't he realize that his yearning to be something other than himself was hopelessly wrong, was wasting his life and poisoning his heart?
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Children are nothing but tools of their parents
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Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?
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That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation...you know
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I want to change me heart and I don't know how
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I know what you do... I know why you do it. I can name you more truly than you can name yourself
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Was it worth it? To lose part of who he had been in order to live free? Perhaps this new self was better than the old
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No one is the same person today that he was yesterday. No one had a body as young as it was, or a heart so naive, or a head so ignorant as it was
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Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live
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I don't know you, ma'am, and apparently I'm expected to die for you
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You know nothing at all about men like me
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They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be
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[He] did not understand it, and I did not tell him then, but you know, don't you? She began to love him then. And part of why she loved him was because he looked like you. Does it make you laugh?
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Take upon themselves the burden of the world. Have to save everybody, help everybody, provide for everybody. And when they can't do it, they can't think of any other reason to live. Was that [him]? Probably. A man who had forgotten, not how to live, but why.
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I'm not your daughter! I'm not your sister! I'm not your anything!
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Imitation of life. Mimesis. That's all I am. Plato said we were all shadows. Me more than most
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I'm nobody's child You're mine now. Not my child, but mine, to miss you when you go, to look out for you, to hope you'll be careful
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He'll remember me. And I'll feel it. I'll know that I was known, that I am known. That someone holds me in his heart
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Even step - she knew that she didn't really know him, that always there was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore
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My life is still good because you're in it. Everything good in my life comes from you. Step shook his head. He knew she meant it, but in fact he knew that it wasn't true. Even the goof she found in him was really the goodness she had put in him, the goodness he had put on himself as a disguise in order to get her to marry him. He had known that she could only be happy with a husband who was good in certain distinct ways.... She never realized that it was a sacrifice he was making out of love for her, in order to be part of her. She thought it was his own desire, and she loved him for it. But what she was really loving was herself, reflected back at her
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I don't care what you do to a box, it's still a box
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It was from her that I drew my identity, it was around her that I built my hopes, it was in her that I had my life.... She was deeply good, brilliant of mind and generous of heart, and she loved me. Our bond was stronger than blood, than religion, than language, than marriage. It was the bond of self-hood. I saw the world through her eyes, and she through mine. We - almost - were the same person
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There are depths to me that no one has glimpsed, not even me
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Sometimes when people mess up their lives and want to make a fresh start, the way they do it is to go somewhere nobody knows them. You can be a different person, because nobody remembers the mistakes you made or how nasty you used to be. It's just like erasing a computer's memory. Once you reformat the memory drive, nobody knows what used to be there; all they care is what's on the drive now
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No one had known him. No one knows me. No one knows who I am or what I can do.
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A way to make it respond to who a person really is. Cut through all the: Yes? Just wondering Cut through all the ? Stories we tell ourselves. All the lies that we believe about ourselves. About who we really are
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At last he was what he had always pretended to be. An ordinary, powerless man. He hated it.
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She felt a dizzying vertigo, as if she stood on the edge of a great chasm, and the ground had just shifted a little under her feet. What sort of arrogance did she have, even to imagine reaching back into the past and making changes? Who am I, she thought, if I dare to answer prayers intended for the gods?
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You are mine, but you are not mine. I am yours, but you hardly know it. He was not unhappy but he wasn't happy, either
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From man to woman to angel. Next transformation, please?
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You are not what you seem So many people have said that that I'm beginning to think that's precisely how I do seem. What is it I seem to be that you have now discovered that I'm not?
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You don't exist, you can't be real she means it one way, but I believe it another
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[He] didn't know what he wanted, but he did know what he didn't want. What he didn't want was any of the girls at school. He had lots of friends who were girls. He liked them. Nice girls. Just not for him.
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I am the truth. I am the deepest truth in the most secret places of your heart. I am all your dreams come true.
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Aren't you the strong one. Aren't you brave, to insist on reality. You never could face your own dreams.
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Please, someday if I'm real good, can't I be a real girl?
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You're thinking of your wife Yeah, well, I was thinking that I still feel married I'm glad to hear it. I've known too many men who never quite felt married no matter how many wives they'd been through. Their own and otherwise
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Who are you? A question I've been trying to answer since adolescence. I finally decided that I was neither god nor Satan. I was so disappointed that I didn't try to narrow it down any further
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I'm so much like you that to love me is purest narcissism
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My strongest memories are yours
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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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I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.
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But you tell me that you loved her, though she was an adulteress. Isn't she the same person tonight? Has she changed between yesterday and today? Or is it only you who have changed?
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Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. -Ender's Game
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I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it. -Ender's Game
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Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother? (Children of the Mind)
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We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe.