aquasilvercj's Diaryland Diary

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Orson Scott Card quotationage.

What love was ever pure, what lover was ever uncomplicated?

Even a child's play is not without moral context.

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously."

You know how writers are. They create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

Do the gods of different nations
talk to each other?
Do the gods of Chinese cities
speak to the ancestors of the Japanese?
To the lords of Xibalba?
To Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu?
Is there some annual get-together
where they compare each other's worshippers?
Mine will bow their faces to the floor
and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one.
Mine will sacrifice animals, says another.
Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third.
Here is the question I think of most often:
Are there any who can honestly boast,
My worshippers obey my good laws,
and treat each other kindly,
and live simple generous lives?

How easy it was to be a human, with your emotions expressed on the canvas of your own body. And yet how hard, because you couldn't hide your feelings from yourself half as easily.

Why do people act as if war and murder were unnatural?
What's unnatural is to go your whole life
without ever raising your hand in violence.

Why should anyone have children? Someday they will die, their children will die, all children will die. Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we were there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth -- what is, what was, what will be -- not what could be, what should have been, what never can be. If we die, then our death has meaning to the rest of the universe. Even if our lives were unknown, the fact that someone lived here, and died, that will have repercussions, that will shape the universe.

12:57 p.m. - July 20, 2004

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