8 Orson Scott Card Quotes on Trauma

Orson Scott Card quotes on trauma

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.

116. He would go to minister the girl ... For in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of pain that lived with him still.

607. What [he] felt for her was genuine, and not just for love of her perfect flesh. I know [him] truly, and I know that when he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood

609. Poor beauty. May I not pity her, of all people? She loved him, but she had only learned one way to show her love - through cruelty and abuse

621. He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust

671. Only when she stopped being dead, only these few weeks with [him] in the house did she understand how dead she had been. Lost in her guilt, her shame, her pain, her losses. Now that she had learned again to love and hope, now that she was no longer as ashamed or guilty, of course it was the very joy that was killing her again.

701. At that point, if I had consciously realized what I was already planning to do, if I had admitted my rage, my feelings of betrayal, then my conditioning would have kicked in and I would have either suppressed those feelings or gone mad

987. [He] had never been beaten up. He had, however, seen the Rodney king tape.