Orson Scott Card Quotes

Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited.

Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.

So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice." I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.

There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it

Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.

Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.

I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.

Legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples. It's about giving the Left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.

Grief,she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.

...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.

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.

Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.

It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.

From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

'So if we can we'll kill every last of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us. As for me,' said Ender, 'I'm in favor of surviving'.

Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.

Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one's family was much worse. Humiliation of one's social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.

...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.

He jumped at the Giants face, clambered up his lip and nose, and began to dig in the Giant's eye.

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.

He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it, either. Government office should be received like a child’s Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.

the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.

Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai. "What?" "About your having diarrhea." "For you I'd get dysentery." "Now that's friendship.

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

In a way, being a Mormon prepares you to deal with science fiction, because we live simultaneously in two very different cultures. The result is that we all know what it's like to be strangers in a strange land. It's not just a coincidence that there are so many effective Mormon science fiction writers. We don't regard being an alien as an alien experience. But it also means that we're not surprised when people don't understand what we're saying or what we think.

She likes us,” said Umbo. “I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.” “Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.” “They were delicious.

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

You will learn to defeat the enemy.

One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?

Into the the air, into the earth, into the fire, I am with you.

Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.

Let's fly away and live forever

The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them―noticing them―that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The part of the man's statement that was true, however, was about the uselessness of speaking up. If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.

You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.

That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends.

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.