Orson Scott Card Quotes on Isolation
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Ender would be pleased - every one of them was stupid.
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We have to strike a delicate balance. Isolate him enough that he remains creative -otherwise he'll adopt the system here and well lose him. At the same time, we need to make sure he keeps a strong ability to lead.
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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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How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out.
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In all [my] life, you are the first person [I've] known that wasn't [myself]. [I] never had to be understanding because [I] always understood.
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I have too many secrets.
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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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She thinks she's the only one in the would to ever suffer. I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she's so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously.
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You imagine that I love you, but I do not. I don't love anyone.
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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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Everything I ever felt myself to be a part of is dead
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You know nothing at all about men like me
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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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No one had known him. No one knows me. No one knows who I am or what I can do.
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The greatest work of all is the one that will die with us, the one that no one else will ever know of, because they remain perpetually outside. We can't even explain it to them. They don't have the language to understand us. We can only speak I to each other
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There was other folks who had a way of sucking you to them, without saying a thing, without doing a thing, you just went into a room and couldn't take your eyes off them, you wanted to be close - I saw that other kids felt the same way, just automatically liked them, you know? But I could feel it like they was on fire, and suddenly I was cold and needed to warm myself. And id say something about it and people would look at me like I was crazy enough to lock right up, and I finally caught on that I was the only one who had those feelings
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I hoped for your company. For many conversations' she thought about it, but in the end she shook her head. 'It would be too:hard for me. This is too hard for me. Seeing you brings back another life. A time when I was another person maybe now and then. Every few years
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Are we the only sane people in the world?
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You have so little love for your own life?' You don't know, you've never been alone like I have, but in my solitude I've discovered something. That I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.
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So there he was with... No career, and, to put it candidly, no life. It was as if he had been running a long, long race and finally realized that there was nobody else in it with him, he had crossed the finish line years ago and didn't notice it because not a soul was there to cheek for him and clap him on the back and say 'Good run... Good run!' Or come to think of it, maybe they were there, only [he] himself didn't care what they thought of him and so he sloughed off their praise and their friendship because he was waiting for the one voice he'd never hear again.
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Why have I made myself as solitary as the dead?
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Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive