Orson Scott Card Quotes on Life
-
: I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.
-
Time, time is such a fleeting, insubstantial thing. As Shakespeare said, 'I wasted time, and now doth time waste me'
-
As long as you keep getting born, it's ok to die sometimes
-
There are worse reasons to die, than to die because you cannot bear to kill What about someone who can't kill, and can't die, and can't live, either? Don't deceive yourself. You'll do all three someday
-
Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand.
-
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.
-
If you act as the enemy of life, then life will become your enemy.
-
Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.
-
You don't know that you're right. And you don't know that I'm wrong. It's my life. The hell it is.
-
Simple food but it tasted good and they were satisfied.
-
A male does his best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible. I've done the wandering. Somehow I missed out on the copulating.
-
Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life.
-
There's no meaning of life if I've lost you.
-
Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.
-
Life is a suicide mission.
-
How do we remember? Is the brain a jar that holds our memories? Then when we die, does the jar break? Are our memories spilled on the ground and lost? Or is the brain a map that leads down twisted paths and into hidden corners? Then when we die, the map is lost but perhaps some explorer could wander through that strange landscape and find out the hiding places of our misplaced memories.
-
What had been lost was found again. And those who had been hungry without knowing the name of their hunger, were fed.
-
That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very very good.
-
Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life
-
Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.
-
Just because you're a fatalist doesn't mean I want to die.
-
I only exist in this place. I am only human in this place.
-
It's tragic isn't it, that we don't always get what we want in this world.
-
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
-
She began to understand things she had never understood before. The world was not as clear and simple a place as she had thought till now.
-
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.
-
Why has my life turned out to be so worthless?
-
He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends
-
I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!
-
Maybe if I could bear my life as it is for one day, for one hour, for one minute, I could forget my wish to be something else
-
In their ignorance, they were happy
-
Someone has to be an audience for the play you people are always improvising. All of you trying for the center stage. All of you trying to get the audience to notice you, to declare you the star, so that when you die, the curtain will come down and the show will end. But it never does. No one was the star after all That's the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings Which should imply that it has no meaning I mean my own life. I mean what I do
-
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
-
Somewhere there was a woman he could love and live with till he died
-
You spend you're whole life grieving for those who haven't died yet
-
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?
-
I hurt him again. I meant to pretend to love him, but in the moment I simply told the truth, which is my habit. And I don't know that I want to change that habit. You can tell a lie now and then. But what happens to you when you try to live your whole life inside a lie?
-
In the absence of understanding, that was a good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were. Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy? Was there really any difference?
-
He thought he was miserable, but he would look back on this as the happiest of times
-
Imitation of life. Mimesis. That's all I am. Plato said we were all shadows. Me more than most
-
I wasn't a believer' I was raised that way, but when [she] died I decided that was all the proof I needed that god didn't exist or if he did he didn't care about us at all
-
Wishes are a waste of time... They only make you unhappy
-
What an ugly world you choose to live in Not neat and pretty like yours, not bound about by rules the way yours is. Laws and principals, theories and hypotheses, may they cover your eyes and keep you happy
-
I think you need help Don't we all
-
I think god stopped paying attention long ago
-
How is it less bearable than that beautiful boy who wanted so badly to do the right thing that he did it all wrong, lost his chance, and now is caught in the sum of all his wrong turns? I got on the road they all wanted to take, and I reached the top, but it wasn't where I should have gone, I'm still that boy. I did not have to lie when I went home to her
-
You have no sex life whatsoever. Don't you realize how dangerous that is? You don't even masturbate. The tension and hostility inside you must be tremendous.
-
Her soul belong as much to [them] as to him. By dividing her loyalties, she fragmented them; none were strong enough to sway her deepest desires. Thus he discovered what he supposed all faithful men eventually discover - that no human relationship is ever anything but tentative. There is no such thing as an unbreakable bond between people.
-
Nothing can last. Nothing is, finally, what it once seemed to be. [she] and he had the perfect marriage until there came a stress that exposed it's imperfection. Anyone who thinks he has a perfect marriage, a perfect friendship, a perfect trust of any kind, he only believes this because the stress that will break it has not yet come. He might die with the illusion of happiness, but all he has proven is that sometimes death comes before betrayal. If you live long enough, betrayal will inevitably come
-
I don't ever want to see you again. You've made me regret the one unregretable decision of my life - [her]. You've made me wish, somewhere in my heart, that id never married her. Which is like making me wish id never been born
-
All that you do is mortal - it is all born. It all dies. And yet you struggle against mortality and have overcome it, building up tremendous stores of shared knowledge through your finite books and your finite words. You put frames on everything Mass insanity, then. But it explains nothing about why you worship. You must come here to mock us. Not to mock you. To envy you Then die
-
We have found a race that builds for the sheer joy of building, that creates beauty, that writes books, that invents the lives of never-known people to delight other who know they are being lied to, a race that devises immortal gods to worship and celebrates it's own mortality with immense pomp and glory. Death is the foundation of all that is great about humanity
-
How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than I clean, painless death?
-
The only perspective that matters is the human one, Tagiri knew. We are the only ones who care; we are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics
-
To be cut off from the land of the living, and yet not to be dead. How could I bear that? That's how most men live, and don't even know it
-
I want to see the king Wonderful. I'm glad for you. Why are you so glad? Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant
-
They were alive and so I was and I had no objections
-
We'll die heroically I'd rather live
-
You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything
-
You don't exist, you can't be real she means it one way, but I believe it another
-
For all the planning and plotting that I did before I acted, I know that I was shaped more by circumstance that by my own will I wonder sometimes if I'm not, after all, a piece in some other players game, following blindly his grand designs without ever knowing that my path along the board is only a feint, while the important matters are played out elsewhere by other men
-
But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done, then the price, once paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value
-
Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you. It was especially important for [him], because he was living for two
-
Then he thought, is my life so empty that this is the best thing I can think of to think about?
-
What is reality?
-
Death's alright. But not worth going through any extra trouble to get here. You miss everything when you're here... Even the pain. Even the despair.
-
I love only life. But life can only continue in the face of death.
-
What are they afraid of? 'Dying first But they still die don't they?
-
Who were they to play god with his life? They had been playing god with his life from the beginning
-
It's the only way to save your life Did you ever ask me if I wanted my life to be saved?
-
Who are you, god? You decide who's supposed to live and how?
-
The opposite. I love only life. But life can only continue in the face of death. (The Worthing Saga)
-
'If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?'
-
Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life. -Children of the Mind