Shadows in Flight Quotes

“What I want," he said softly, "is to stand in this meadow and walk in the light of the sun.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“I think it's a rule that it's socially acceptable to wet yourself when aliens enter your mind for the first time. If it wasn't already, it is now.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“Whenever I think about thinking, my thoughts become words. It is the language talking at me. But the language came from outside. I think I control it, but it controls me back.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“They all thought they understood each other, and in many ways they did. What none of them was capable of understanding was their own character. They were so young, they still believed that the motive they knew about was the real reason for their actions. Adults could say, No, I won’t say that, because I’m really just envious, there’s nothing actually wrong with what he did. But the child wouldn’t be aware of the envy, only the anger, so the criticism, the insult, the gibe would be spoken and the damage done. Trust broken.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“I’m talking about putting yourself inside someone else and embracing their needs, understanding what they hunger for, and also what will actually be good for them. Understanding them better than they understand themselves. Like a mother who can tell when her child is sleepy even as the child absolutely denies that he’s sleepy at all. He did that with his opponents. He saw them whole and true. And then he helped them discover the truth about themselves—that they weren’t warriors. They didn’t have the talent for it. He revealed to them that war was not their right path. Which was always true. War isn’t the right path. If you love war, you’ll fail at it, compared to someone like Ender who hates it so much that he’ll do anything to win and put an end to it.” “You hate war to win it. You love your enemy to destroy him. I don’t like paradoxes, they always feel as though somebody’s trying to trick me.” “Usually they’re just tricking themselves. But these aren’t really paradoxes. Someone who thinks he loves war is always wrong, because war destroys everything it touches. It unbuilds things. So when war can’t be avoided, you fight in such a way as to reveal to the enemy how war is destroying him. When he finally sees it, he stops.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“He was thinking: What does the enemy want and need? How can I give them what they need, in such a way as to leave them vulnerable? How can I take away the enemy’s will or capacity to fight? It’s a different mindset.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“Cincinnatus was named for the great Roman general who saved his country and then set down his power and returned to the farm to live out his life in peace.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“We’re all feral children, and by ‘we’ I mean the entire human race and all of its variants. We’ve only just started to evolve into creatures that actually like and need civilization. We all have to suppress the aggressive alpha male and the savagely protective mother so that we can live together in close proximity.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“he wanted to be as good as he imagined them to be, so he bent his whole life to trying to pretend to be a real boy, and he’s continuing to act out that script, because he’s afraid that if he ever stops, he’ll find out that he’s still that same starving scavenger that stayed alive somehow on the streets of Rotterdam.” Carlotta laughed. “It doesn’t occur to you that maybe it was the role of the feral child that was forced onto him, and the good man in our cargo hold is the real Julian”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“gestured at the life-support equipment all around him. “There’s nothing natural about the air we breathe.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“Doesn’t mean someone really resourceful can’t do things that surprise them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“You always say you know, but I don’t think you knew any such thing,”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“Children never do understand their own childishness.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“The limbic node deep in her brain didn't understand that she no longer lived in a tree, no longer had to panic when she felt herself to be falling.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“So when war can’t be avoided, you fight in such a way as to reveal to the enemy how war is destroying him. When he finally sees it, he stops.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight

“Wasn’t that the definition of adulthood? That you wanted one thing, but did another because you knew what was right and good, and wanted to do the right and the good more than you wanted to do what you wanted.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadows in Flight