Devon > Devon's Quotes

“I mean, it’s hard to avoid. Chris, she asks so many questions, and—well…” She gave a helpless little shrug. “It’s just hard. I mean, how do I answer without telling what I think is a great big lie?” “Give her multiple choice.”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“MY BROTHER HURTS. I SHARE HIS PAIN. I MEET GOD IN HIM.”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“For a time, Karras watched him as he listed down the street; watched with fondness and with wonder at the heart’s labyrinthine turnings and improbable redemptions.”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“When the aliens first made contact, Trina and her not-yet-wife, Deeba,”
― Chana Porter, The Seep

“And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother’s breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“I’m a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.”
― Orson Scott Card

“Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves—either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. “But the sky only seems to be far away from you,” said Master Han, when she told him this. “Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labor with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of one such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a round-eyed man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that she could not understand.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“You mean I have to get the confession from the white boy? They train these boys to lie, you know. If you’re white they don’t let you grow up to adulthood if you haven’t mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“this temple of living cells on a frame of bone”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“She was copious, her sap-filled veins, her skeleton of wood, her tingling leaves that bathed in light, her roots that tapped into seas of water salted with the stuff of life.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“You’re just Ender in drag, doing his Valentine bit. You come off the stage and there’s nothing there, it comes off like makeup and a costume.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“as you look up at these towering mound-people,”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“Perhaps those who grew up among these people might somehow sublimate their ambition, or perhaps there was something in the racial genotype that suppressed it or replaced it,”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”
― Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

“There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile

“Fifteen-year-old females don’t have to have their parents’ consent to volunteer to be colonists. We’re the ideal age for reproduction, and are assumed to be dumb enough to volunteer.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender In Exile

“It’s like those foolish attempts to control immigration to America based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically is “descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there.” And we won’t go into the way Australian colonists were selected!”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile

“I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Maybe I stopped going to swimming because I was afraid of what would happen if, after months of treading water, it still didn’t work. Maybe I quit yoga because I was afraid of what would happen if I lost a ton of weight and that still didn’t fix my insides. I can’t afford therapy, but I can buy a sandwich.”
― Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.