Орсон Скотт Кард цитаты

страница 10

„Он свинья. - Свиньи в целом вполне приличный народ.
- Ты прав, я к ним несправедлив.“

„Земля - это непрекращающийся треск цикад, свист ветра и пение птиц.“

„Я есть то, что я помню.“

„Любовь — это богатство, которое ты можешь иметь только в том случае, когда все враги твои истреблены. До этого же, каждый кого ты любишь – заложник, ослабляющий твое бесстрашие и подкупающий трезвость твоего рассудка.“

“As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”

“I interpreted all you did as weakness — but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don't deserve it.”

“And he wanted a wife. He wanted to raise children. He wanted to prove that goodness wasn’t beaten into children, that fear was not the fount from which virtue flowed. He wanted to be able to gather his family in his arms and know that not one of them dreaded the sight of him, or felt the need to lie to him in order to have his love.”

““I see Alvin with a son. That what he want most.”
“I see him with a woman,” said Rien. “That is what he miss the most.”
“I see him kneeling by a child’s grave,” said Dead Mary. “That is what he fears the most.””

“Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a little queen. And your mercy will be your undoing.”

“What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he’s done, and that’s as good as any man ever gets.”

“Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again.”

“Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man’s sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman’s throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer’s table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk.”

“You just refuse to leave them alone until they change their minds. Of their own free will.”

“Andrew Jackson neatly resolved the issue by walking into congress and placing his hand on the Bible they kept there as a reminder of all the virtues they worked so hard to get the voters to believe they possessed.”

“What is the White man? What does he do?
The White man is like a human being, but he crushes all other living things under his feet.
Then why, O Ta-Kumsaw, when I look into your heart, why is it that you do not wish to hurt the White man, that you do not wish to kill the White man?
The White man doesn’t know the evil that he does. The White man doesn’t feel the peace of the land, so how can he tell the little deaths he makes? I can’t blame the White man. But I can’t let him stay. So when I make him leave this land, I won’t hate him.”

“A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it.”

“She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind.”

“I was forgetting how it really was, I was remembering it through common, ordinary eyes, I was remembering it as the boy I was before, but now I remember that it wasn't me being weak or me being naked, or anything else that I should be ashamed of.”

““Black with hate,” said Becca. “You are gathering your people with hate.”
“Can you imagine conducting a war with love?” asked Ta-Kumsaw.
“That’s a reason to refuse to make war at all,” she said gently.”

“This is Alvin Smith,” said Cooper. “He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.”

“Wasn’t that their natural right, to know the truth so as to be able to let the truth lead them to do good or evil, as they chose?”

“Knowing was better than not knowing. But not by much.”

“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.”

“It never occurred to you that they might be flattering you, because you don't lie.”

“She don’t set no store to see a king. Her pa a king back in Africa, and they shoot him dead. Them Portuguese slavers show her what it mean to be a king—it mean you die quick like everybody, and spill blood red like everybody, and cry out loud in pain and scared—oh, fine to be a king, and fine to see one. Do them White folk believe this lie?”

“In Vanya's family, silence had never meant surrender, only tactical retreat.”

“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.”

“Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived.”

“You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me.”

“I don't mind dying before you do. In fact, I rather prefer it that way.”

“You really are children. You have no idea how power works, or who has it, or what you can actually do with it.”

“A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.”

“Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.”