Orson Scott Card Quotes

Child. That was a terrible thing to say to anyone who was almost thirteen.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect.

I heard someone say once that the years from fifteen to nineteen are the best years in a girl's life.

How old are you? Twelve?" "Fourteen & three quarters." His eyes sparkled. "You're kind of little for fourteen and three quarters." "Am not," I replied indignantly. "I'm a sophomore this year. How old are you?" "Seventeen and two fifths." Hardy Cateses & Liberty Jones.

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.

I am a child who is getting on.

Youth is a mortal wound.

What was it about high school that made people think with their insecurities instead of their brains?

Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.

When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.

Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.

People get stupid when they're in love; people want what they can't have; and the years between ages twelve and eighteen always, always suck.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

I wanted the Andy of Toy Story 3 to be right on the cusp, straddling childhood and adulthood ... I wanted to find this sweet spot where he had gotten tall and had clearly grown up but still retained many boyish qualities, including a boyish charm.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

One doesn't remain a teenager forever.

Life is like a ship. There's people dancing on a ship.There's a lot of money on the ship, but I cannot integrate on the ship or get equality on the ship.And I never could. I'm just in the galley working and I never could get up to see the captain of the ship.