Orson Scott Card Quotes

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

A character is what he does, yes - but even more, a character is what he means to do.

Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and somehow we managed to defeat him, even though he was naked and wet and alone--Ender Wiggin is so dangerous and terrifying it was all we could do not to bring two hundred.

You're cultural supremacists to the core. You'll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn't a chance in the world you'll notice when they have something to teach you.

Civilisation is only a pretense. In crisis we have become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and instead becoming the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone we will use the moment it comes close enough

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.

The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is Third.

Most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy's stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan.

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?

If anyone have intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man have intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment. But he shall not approach the king, and shall not become a priest... If a pig spring upon a man for intercourse, there is no punishment.

The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.

It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

Take me home, he said silently to Graff. In my dream you said you loved me. Take me home

Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement." It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.

If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do.

You killed more people than anybody in history." "Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.

And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.

I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat. ~Val

Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive.

I have too many secrets. For all these years I've been a speaker for the dead, uncovering secrets and helping people to live in the light of truth. Now I no longer tell anyone half of what I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be fear, hatred, brutality, murder, war.

It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.

A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure that anyone who opposed them must be either stupid and decieved or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.

Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?

But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.

Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.

Oh, Val," said Father. "All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be happier." "No greatness, then." "Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day." "Not in the history books," said Valentine. "Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.

Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Rumors are the sauce of a dry life.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

The difference between science fiction and fantasy … is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.

We're like the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, then eat the little brats alive.

If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out.

Oh, I'll live Ender's life, too. It's so much more interesting than my own." ~Val

Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty.

I didn't want to see you." "They told me." "I was afraid that I'd still love you." "I hoped that you would.

And yet.. even if you had been right, it would only have been by accident. A broken clock is right two times a day.

I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.

In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.