Quotes by Public Speakers - Page 5

These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.
Orson Scott Card
Remember, I'm the only person her who's paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I'll break your face. OK?
Orson Scott Card
I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.
Orson Scott Card
All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty.
Donald Miller
It was the waiting and watching that cost the most. For during that time he had to endure.
Orson Scott Card
That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets, and winds, and birds
Orson Scott Card
It isn’t the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.
Orson Scott Card
When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.
Orson Scott Card
The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.
Orson Scott Card
In Russia you learn patience," said Ivan. "In America you learn action.
Orson Scott Card
Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.
Orson Scott Card
America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.
Orson Scott Card
I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.
Orson Scott Card
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.
Orson Scott Card
My father once told methat there are no gods;only the cruel manipulationsof evil peoplewho pretended that their power was goodand their exploitation was love.But if there are no gods;why are we so hungry to believe in them?Just because evil liarsstand between us and the godsand block our view of themdoes not mean that the bright halothat surrounds each liaris not the outer edges of a god, waitingfor us to find our way around the lie.
Orson Scott Card
People falling in love for one reason may fall out of love due to another reason. However, if faith or trust is the basis of love, it does not break easily. Often people use all their reasoning to understand each other and even live together for years to satisfy themselves that they are in love. However, marriages based on such logical love, the love based on reason, do not last long. Quite to the contrary, marriages where the partners do not even know each other, survive for life—being based on mutual trust and faith.
Awdhesh Singh
When you shut down vulnerability, you shut down opportunity
Brené Brown
If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine.And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.
Orson Scott Card
The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.
Donald Miller
It doesn't matter if the group is a church or a gang or a sewing circle or masculinity itself, asking members to dislike, disown, or distance themselves from another group of people as a condition of 'belonging' is always about control and power. I think we have to question the intentions of any group that insists on disdain toward other people as a membership requirement. It may be disguised as belonging, but real belonging doesn't necessitate disdain.
Brené Brown
The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
Donald Miller
I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender's Game)
Orson Scott Card
We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
Donald Miller
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
Brené Brown
...I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.
Donald Miller
I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.
Donald Miller
The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.
Donald Miller
I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
Donald Miller
The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.
Orson Scott Card
Human beings remember "firsts"- the first time something happens, or the begining of an experience- and we tend to remember "lasts" as well. So when you are about to make a critical/negative delivery , start your criticism with a positive begining, it will affect the rest of the experience. Start by giving them solid ground to stand by expressing the fact that you value them and they matter. Once they are reassured of their own worth, people will accept your comments far more easily and they'll get less defensive.
Olivia Fox Cabane
[Mandela] subsequently used words that never left me: 'Because you hold a particular position, doesn't mean that you are more important that anyone else. Your time is not more valuable that anybody else's time. If you are late you show that you have no respect for another person's time and therefore no respect for other people because you consider yourself to be more important.
Zelda la Grange
It is of vital importance to [Mandela] to be courteous and grateful at all times, as we never know whether we will have the opportunity to thank people or pay respect whenever they have been good to you.
Zelda la Grange
The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction…If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.
Malcolm Gladwell
Because these fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.
Orson Scott Card
He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream.
Orson Scott Card
[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
Malcolm Gladwell
I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.
Donald Miller
Home was merely a dull ache in the back of his memory. A tiredness in his eyes.
Orson Scott Card
«Linkeree does what he likes. He likes to be alone and think his own thoughts. No one is hurt by it.» Sara said, «Jason said that we are one people. Linkeree is saying he does not want to be part of us, and if he is not part of us then we are all less than we were.» They were both very wise. It would be so much easier for Kapock if they had only agreed with each other.
Orson Scott Card
You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.
Donald Miller
When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.
Donald Miller
We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.
Donald Miller
People are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows something interesting, something that can make your life richer.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley
In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley
The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.
Donald Miller
In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.
Brené Brown
Thank you' is a wonderful phrase. Use it. It will add stature to your soul.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley
I don't have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness - it's right in front of me if I'm paying attention and practicing gratitude.
Brené Brown
I've had enough adventures," said Noxon, "to know that boredom is the closest thing to happiness. Boredom means that there's nothing wrong. You're not hungry, you're not in pain. Nobody's making any demands on you. Your mind is free to think whatever you want. The only thing that makes boredom unpleasant is if you're impatient for something else to happen.
Orson Scott Card
Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.
Orson Scott Card
If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.
Orson Scott Card
I thought speakers didn't believe in sin," said a sullen boy.Andrew smiled. "You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.
Orson Scott Card
She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell.Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it.And it's delicious.
Orson Scott Card
Let's fly away and live forever
Orson Scott Card
It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.
Orson Scott Card
I didn't know how you'd get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.
Orson Scott Card
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
Malcolm Gladwell
I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)
Malcolm Gladwell
Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation.""What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?""An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife."Achilles held up the bloody thing, dangling it from the point. "Yours?" he asked."Unless you want to clean it," said Suriyawong.Achillese handed it to him. Suriyawong took out his cleaning kit and wiped down the blade, then began to polish it."You wanted me to die," said Achilles quietly."I expected you to solve your own problems," said Suriyawong.
Orson Scott Card