From: Enchantment

                I called Card a good author for a long time, because Speaker for the Dead was an excellent book, even though Ender's Game and Children of the Mind were only good. And the Shadow series proved better than these. His insight, in some ideas contained in Empire is so reasonable that it terrifies me. But with all those, I assumed they were his best work and did not look at anything else, because they were good but not great. I have only so much time to read, and I'm trying to spend it on the great.  
               The assumption I made was the most people who read do so with the intelligence to recognize great writing and promote it above the good. I should know better than to believe that, but I did anyway. All I can say is the Enchantment is absolutely the best piece I have ever read within its genera. It is the proof that Card is not a mediocre writer who has clever ideas for stories occasionally writes marvelous things, but is qualified to be named among the best storytellers, he just also writes things which are popular and make money. Aaron said something along these lines to me, although he chose a different book to be his example.  
                I say these things because the quote I'm posting is good, but it has nothing to do with why the book is great. I'm not posting as evidence of my opinion, because this does not support it at all. I'm posting this for a more personal reason. The context is a scientific, grad-student, son explains to his scientific, doctorate, father that he directly experienced very real magic in the spells-and-enchantments sense of the word. 
              I'm posting this because I've tried to say that science is a faith before, and though many have agreed, I find these words better than my own to say it. I'm posting this because so many people have wished something like this would be true. It is little wonder that “fairy tales” retain their value and potency today, even if the exact treatment of the subject has changed over the few millennia of recorded human thought. We want to believe, we just don't know what. 

from: Orson Scott Card, Enchantment

                  “Where exactly did I earn this reputation as an unskeptical believer of whatever bullshit comes down the pike? And you, Father, when did you becomes the supreme rationalist, the impartial judge of evidence you haven't even seen? It seem to me that I'm the eyewitness, and you're the one making judgments based soely on your pre-existing faith.”
                  “Faith in a rational universe, yes.”
                  “No, Father. You don't have faith in a rational universe. This is a universe where nothing can move faster than the utterly arbitrary speed of 186,000 miles per second, where feathers and rocks fall at the same speed in a vacuum, where a measurable but unexplainable force called gravity binds people to planets and planets to stars, and where a butterfly's wing in China might cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. But you have faith in all this incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo which you don't begin to understand, solely because the priests of the established church of the intellectuals have declared these to be immutable laws and you, being a faithful supplicant at their altar, don't even think to question them.”
                  “You sound like a convert to a new religion yourself,” said Father dryly.                 
                 “Maybe I am. Or maybe I'm the guy who crawled out of the cave, and you're still back inside it, trying to understand the universe by studying shadows on the wall. Well, Father, I've seen things that can only be explained by magic. Now, I guess, I'm really still a closet materialist, because I believe these things all have rational explanations, using principles of nature that are not yet known to us. But what I can't do is close my eyes and pretend that the tings that have happened to me will go away if I just say 'Einstein' five times fast.”
                  “I was invoking Occam, you'll remember,” said Father.