Orson Scott Card

Dread is the first and the strongest types of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is. The fear that comes when you first realize that your spouse should have been home an hour ago; when you realize that a window you are sure you closed is now open, the curtains billowing, and you're alone in the house.Terror only comes when you see the thing you're afraid of. The intruder is coming at you with a knife. The headlights coming toward you are clearly in your lane. The Klansmen have emerged from the bushes and one of them is holding a rope. This is when all the muscles of your body, except perhaps the sphincters, tauten and you stand rigid; or you scream; or you run. There is a frenzy to this moment, a climactic power-but it is the power of release, not the power of tension. And bad as it is, it is better than dread in this respect: Now, at lest, you know the face of the thing you fear. You know its borders, its dimensions. You know what to expect.Horror is the weakest of all. After the fearful thing has happened, you see its remainder, its relics. The grisly, hacked-up corpse. Your emotions range from nausea to pity for the victim. And even your pity is tinged with revulsion and disgust; ultimately you reject the scene and deny its humanity; with repetition, horror loses its ability to move you and, to some degree, dehumanizes the victim and therefore dehumanizes you. As the sonderkommandos in the death camps learned, after you move enough naked murdered corpses, it stops making you want to weep or puke. You just do it. They've stopped being people to you.

But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar__r Graff, if it was him__aunch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they__ risk a shuttle and it__ crew just to catch me? I find that quite_ flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.

Come in, Bean." Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.

Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes.""So God uses wicked people as his tools?""God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses.""So, in the long run, God always wins?""Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.

It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.

Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.

We have to go. I'm almost happy here.

Your motivation has to be rock solid. You have to want it so bad that even th threat of death won't take it from you.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on,

Because human nature never changes.

In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.

Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn't figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. If God loved them so much and he could do whatever he wanted, then why wasn't there more food for these kids? And if God just wanted them dead, why didn't he let them die sooner or not even be born at all, so they didn't have to go to so much trouble and get all excited about trying to be alive when he was just going to take them to his heart. None of it made any sense to Bean, and the more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?

I'm hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what's going to happen next, so you always have to be ready for anything, ready to improvise, determined to win no matter what. I'm also making you miserable.

who would expect less?" she said. " You're a Wiggin." " Whatever that means." He said. " It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.

I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two.The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew.The changeless part was always true, The growing part was always new,And I wondered, when the tale was through, Which part was me, and which was you.

But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.