For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her.

He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires.

A dagger has only a single point, but a traitor cuts from anywhere.

Justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all.

They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be.

Even the people living them could not possibly understand. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events.

To me, the truth is what actually happened.

Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife.

And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity. Originally published as Woman of Destiny.

looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed.

So you took my happiness, and stole my songs. You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now.

He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.

'Atlantis,' from Keeper of Dreams (2008).

But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals.

The great forces of history were real, after a fashion.

'A Sepulchre of Songs,' from The Changed Man (April 1992), ISBN 5-8, page 125.

I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is?.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.

And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. A Planet Called Treason (1st Dell printing ed.).Dialog between Lord Barton and Lanik Mueller, after the latter performs a series of apparent miracles.'Nature's virtue is intact,' I reassured him. 'I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature,' he said, irritated at my failure to respond.

1.13.2 First Meetings in the Enderverse (2003).

1.7 Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996).

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card