Life & Mortality Quote by Orson Scott Card

A reincarnation line that reads like comfort, but carries the chill of a systems-level bargain: individual death is tolerable if the machine of life keeps producing replacements. Card’s phrasing is disarmingly casual - “it’s alright” and “some times” sound like a shrug - which is exactly how the idea slips past our defenses. He frames mortality not as a singular catastrophe but as a negotiable cost, amortized across repeated “births.” The grammar does the work: “you” is both intimate and abstract, inviting the reader to imagine a soul that persists while also flattening any one life into an iteration.

The subtext is classic Card: big metaphysical stakes smuggled through plainspoken logic. In his fiction, identities recur, echo, or are refashioned; death becomes less an ending than a plot device in a cosmos that values continuity of pattern over continuity of body. That can be reassuring - grief is recoded as interruption, not obliteration. It can also be unsettling. If what matters is that “you keep getting born,” then the particularities of this life risk becoming expendable. The line quietly tests an ethical boundary: when does faith in renewal start to sound like permission to waste people?

Context matters because Card often writes about the moral math of survival - communities making hard choices, societies rationalizing sacrifice, protagonists asked to treat lives as pieces on a board. This sentence distills that tension into a lullaby with teeth: a philosophy that can heal, or anesthetize, depending on who’s doing the dying and who gets to keep being born.