Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. He is the first and only person to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in consecutive years, winning both awards for his novel Ender’s Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead. (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
“A broken clock is right two times a day.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“A duel is just two murders who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“A human child loses almost all the memories of the first years of its life, and its long-term memories only take root in its second or third year of life; everything before that is lost, so that the child cannot remember the beginning of life.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“A man who has risked his life knows that careers are worthless, and a man who will not risk his career has a worthless life.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization… One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“A person is what he says and does; that’s how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“A pure soul must never grow attached to any one thing.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“All living things are manipulated as long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can’t be thwarted.”
Orson Scott Card
Songmaster
“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“All the universe is just a dream in God’s mind, and as long as he’s asleep, he believes in it, and things stay real. What you see is God waking up, gradually waking up, and his wakefulness sweeps through the dream, undoes the universe, until finally he sits up, rubs his eyes, and says, “My, what a dream, I wish I could remember what it was,” and in that moment we’ll all be gone.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. “People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That’s nothing. We name them.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart….”
Orson Scott Card
Red Prophet
“America’s intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They’re all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“And anyway most people are idiots. They don’t care about the why. They only care about what threatens them.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“And it might also be that God had nothing to do with it, that it was just the moment that it would have happened anyway, whether she prayed or not.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a ‘brilliant student’ is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we’ve been teaching them.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“And that’s as sure as we ever are of anything. We believe it enough to act as though it’s true. When we’re that sure, we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our lives on it.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.”
Orson Scott Card
Maps in a Mirror
“And there it was. The moment a man answered her right back instead of getting his dander up, why, she flashed a smile fit to charm the warts off a toad.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“And why shouldn’t a grown man live with his mother? Mothers were a rare and precious commodity and if you had one, why in the world would leave her?”
Orson Scott Card
Lost and Found
“Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us—and, through us, you.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“As Ender had once said, most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy’s stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“As long as you keep getting born, it’s all right to die sometimes”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“As the proverb said, “Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.” Too late for thinking now. Too early for eating.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“As they say, a word to the wise is sufficient. And here I’ve gone and written five paragraphs.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Bean just didn’t get it. He didn’t feel that way about anybody. You just live in the place you’re in, you don’t worry about where you used to be or where you wish you were, here is where you are and here’s where you’ve got to find a way to survive and lying in bed boo-hooing doesn’t help much with that.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Being angry isn’t always for a reason that makes sense.”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“Better come with me before your eyes make promises your stomach can’t keep.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“Better to give the man what he wanted and save the objections for the battles worth fighting.”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“Bingwen didn’t argue. What good would it do? When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Afire
“But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“But how to fight with singers, how to win a gift that could only be given freely—those were questions whose answers could not be found.”
Orson Scott Card
Songmaster
“But I have these friends because I stayed with my task. So instead of dragging each other down, we’re building each other up. We’re not just good friends, we’re friends who do each other good.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“But I’m three times your age or more and my brain is worn out and full up. I don’t have much room to tuck new things square inside; they just cling to the outside for a while and drop off.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“But it was not the boyish grin she had known when he bounded along the low-gravity inner corridors of Battle School. This smile had weariness in it, and old fears long mastered but still present. It was the smile of wisdom.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of one such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a round-eyed man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that she could not understand.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“But what kind of race is it, when the racers never let go of each other’s hands, and the winner pulls the loser laughing over the finish line?”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“But when you’re already going crazy from confinement, it doesn’t matter how much you like somebody, how much you love them, how grateful you are for their kindness to you. They will make you nuts. Everything they do grates on you like a bad song that won’t get out of your head.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science….”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Children couldn’t stomach the truth, adults believed. Children had to be protected from the harsh realities of the world.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Afire
“Children never do understand their own childishness.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadows in Flight
“Computers were a kind of magery in themselves, or might as well be – to people who didn’t understand them, they were every bit as inscrutable.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies. To have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill,” said John Adams. “Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“Don’t judge me until you understand me. You can’t understand me if you’ve already judged me.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“Don’t we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don’t we try to frame it so they’ll choose as we think they should?”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“Endurance, after all, was a kind of victory; a kind of heroism, too.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that’s the way of the world, the best way.”
Orson Scott Card
Prentice Alvin
“Everybody needs rescuing. Lonely people need rescuing, anyway. There’s nothing but lonely people in this world. Even people who think they’re not lonely, they’re aching with loneliness or the fear of being lonely. So we saved each other every day for the past couple of months.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost and Found
“Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they’re gone.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Everyone thinks they do, until they take a child into their heart. Only then do you know what it is to be a hostage to love. To have someone else’s life matter more than your own.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“Everyone was always in such a rush to shoot forward that they never took the time to look back. Which was a mistake. If you wanted to avoid snags, kinks, knots, and cuts, you had to “keep your mind on your line,” as the saying went.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” -Taleswapper ”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“Everything was a test. Or a lesson. Or a punishment from which he was supposed to learn a lesson, on which he would be tested later, and punished if he hadn’t learned it.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“Evil isn’t best served by equally evil servants.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“Ezekiel wanted to cry and he wanted to scream. Cry because he couldn’t believe how painful all of this must have been, how sad and lonely Beth must have been. And scream because he never had a clue about the deep pain in Beth’s life.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost and Found
“Faith is not to blindly believe, son. Faith is action. It’s doing something. It’s creating what we need and believing that God will be merciful enough to grant it in his time.”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“Focus too closely on the goal you haven’t accomplished, and you’ll fail to notice the victories you achieve along the way.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“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.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“From a friend you need to take crap. But I’m not your friend. I’m your father. And nobody needs to take crap from their father.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost and Found
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“God gives us the freedom to do great evil, if we choose. Then he uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what he chooses.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“God must have so ordained this world, and that gave hope to the righteous no matter how bleak their cause.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Going to say it anyway,” said Graff. “Poor fool of a boy. Pacifism only works with an enemy that can’t bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“Government is all show when it isn’t murder in the dark … or soldiers in the open.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“Graff smiled a little Mona Lisa smile, if Mona Lisa had been a pudgy colonel.”
Orson Scott Card
A War of Gifts
“Guils is the greatest weapon because its cuts rarely heal and it aims for the heart”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“He didn’t feel that way about anybody. You just live in the place you’re in, you don’t worry about where you used to be or where you wish you were, here is where you are and here’s where you’ve got to find a way to survive and lying in bed boo-hooing doesn’t help much with that.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science.” “In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“He knew he could always be smart later, if that turned out to be a better strategy. But once you admitted to being smart, there was no going back.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“He thinks I’m like him, Mazer realized. That’s what we do as humans; it’s how we read minds. We assume that other people think like we do. So if we’re nasty and suspicious and conniving we assume that everyone is as nasty and suspicious and conniving as we are.”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“He understood all the words, he just had no clue what was going on. The Aunts said what they meant. Or at least they meant what they said.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“He was always just mad enough to take treaties seriously. Honor, you know. I don’t have any.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying among friends.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost”
Orson Scott Card
Prentice Alvin
“Heck, everything we decide will be wrong,” said Step, “because no matter what we do, something bad will happen later. So I refuse to regret any of it.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost Boys
“History is a chaotic system. The details can shift endlessly, but the overall shape remains constant. Make a small change in the past, and it changes enough details in the present that we would not have come together at exactly this place and time to watch exactly this scene. And yet the great movements of history would be largely unchanged.”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“History’s got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can’t be untied.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?”
Orson Scott Card
The Memory of Earth
“How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it…. Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“Humans make a machine, and then fool themselves into believing that their own brains are no better than the machines. This allows them to believe that their creation, the computer, is as brilliant as their own minds. But it’s a ridiculous self-deception. Computers aren’t even in the same league.”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“I believe, when it comes to storytelling … that mistakes are often the beginning of the best ideas. After all, a mistake wasn’t planned. It can’t be a cliché. All you have to do is think of a reason why the mistake isn’t a mistake at all, and you might have something fresh and wonderful, something to stimulate a story you never thought of quite that way before.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“I cut the wood however I like, but it’s the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn’t just your memory that makes you who you are. There’s something in the grain of the mind.”
Orson Scott Card
“I divide officers into four classes—the clever, the lazy, the stupid, and the industrious. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest commands. He has the temperament and the requisite nerves to deal with all situations. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the high staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be removed immediately. —General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, German Chief of Army Command (1930–33)”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“I don’t care if I pass your test, I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly – I’ll beat you unfairly first.- Ender ”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“I don’t freeze up because it isn’t my battle. I’m helping. I’m watching. But I’m free. Because it’s Ender’s game.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“I don’t hate you, I love you, you’re part of myself, you’re my heart and when you go it’s my heart torn out and carried away”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“I firmly believe that a good storyteller’s education never ends, because to tell stories perfectly you have to know everything about everything. Naturally, none of us actually achieve such complete knowledge – but we should live as if we were trying to do so. You can’t afford to close off any area of inquiry.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“I had forgotten the first rule of diplomacy: Russians are never more cooperative than when they are about to betray you.”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.”
Orson Scott Card
Maps in a Mirror
“I have begged and she hasn’t answered. The whales are swimming deep inside me and she doesn’t help. I need help. All the monsters in the world are inside me instead of outside me. I’ve been tricked and trapped and they are inside my walls not outside my walls inside with me and she won’t help me. When I stop thinking about a muscle it shakes. When I stop thinking about a fear it leaps at me. I’m drowning but the lake keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper and I don’t know how to get out the walls go up forever and I can’t climb over and I can’t break through and she won’t talk to me.”
Orson Scott Card
Songmaster
“I have never resisted the Lord in my life, Sister LeSueur, and I never will. But I’m not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost Boys
“I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn’t want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“I must rejoice that I am part of her, instead of resenting that I am not more of her.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“I steal,” Winkle said, with a smile that said I’m joking and a glint in his eye that said I’m not.”
Orson Scott Card
Maps in a Mirror
“I think it’s a rule that it’s socially acceptable to wet yourself when aliens enter your mind for the first time. If it wasn’t already, it is now.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadows in Flight
“I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“I think we’ve taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“I think you’re too smart to write the kind of book that would please the kind of reader who would buy a book with that title.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost and Found
“I understand that you believe that it works,’ said Thrower patiently. ‘But everything in the world is either science or miracles. Miracles came from God in the ancient times, but those times are over. Today if we wish to change the world, it isn’t magic but science that will give us our tools.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn’t just survive, but deserves to.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“I will never hurt you.
Orson Scott Card
I will always help you.
If you are hungry
I’ll give you my food.
If you are frightened
I am your friend.
I love you now.
And love does not end.”
Songmaster
“I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“I’m not a character in one of your novels.” “More’s the pity. You would speak more interesting dialogue if you were.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“I’m not one to despise other people for their sins. I haven’t found one yet, that I didn’t say to myself, I’ve done worse than this.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“I’m on his death list, too.” “Then why are you still alive?” asked Peter. “Because, contrary to widespread belief, Achilles is not a genius and he makes mistakes.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“I’m saying that America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“If good people weren’t so trusting of bad ones, the human race would have died out long ago—most women never would have let most men near them.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly … but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in. I follow God, I believe God, because I want to live in the world that God has shown me.”
Orson Scott Card
The Call of Earth
“If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.”
Orson Scott Card
The Worthing Saga
“If they had the ordinary amount of good luck. Which didn’t seem to be the trend at the moment.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“If you always speak your mind, the evil man will avoid you.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“If you give orders and explain nothing, you might get obedience, but you’ll get no creativity. If you tell them your purpose, then when your original plan is shown to be faulty, they’ll find another way to achieve your goal. Explaining to your men doesn’t weaken their respect for you, it proves your respect for them.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“If you have people do some magic, impossible thing by stroking a talisman or praying to a tree, it’s fantasy; if they do the same thing by pressing a button or climbing inside a machine, it’s science fiction.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“If you try and lose then it isn’t your fault. But if you don’t try and we lose, then it’s all your fault.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“If you wait until you know everything, you never do anything.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Afire
“I’ll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who’ll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“I’m just saying things never get so bad we can’t do something to make them better.”
Orson Scott Card
Prentice Alvin
“I’m not stupid!” In Bean’s experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“In fact she’s a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder.”
Orson Scott Card
Red Prophet
“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.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“In philosophy class I think we finally decided that ‘good’ is an infinitely recursive term – it can’t be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it’s better than bad, though why it’s better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“In the face of a threat to the survival of the species, all these planetside trivialities are put aside until the crisis passes.”
Orson Scott Card
A War of Gifts
“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. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them…. I destroy them.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“In the real world irrational things happened, impossible coincidences happened, because probability required that coincidences rarely, but not never, occur.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“Is the future, is the past, all that matters to you? Don’t you have just a little bit of room for the present?”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“It is a will for the species to survive with the self inside of it, part of it, tied to it, forever one of the strands in the web–”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“It may not be the happiness we had before, it may feel like a lesser version of it for a time, we may not even feel it some days at all. But we have to believe more will come. We have to hope.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“It was a strange, exhilarating feeling to be with people who didn’t want anything from you except your happiness, who were glad just to have you around.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“It was an unbroken network of causality leading back to the first human who wasn’t a chimp. And farther back, to the coalescing of the planets around the sun. If you wish to call that God, go ahead.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“It was as if the boundary between friendship and love was so thin and imperceptible that one could cross it without even knowing it was there.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“It was Ender whose previous victories taught the enemy to think of us as one kind of creature, when we are really something quite different. He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor aliens could ever have conceived of in their nightmares.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“It will hurt.” said Petra. “But let’s make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“It’s all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“It’s about me, or people wouldn’t be so anxious to keep me from knowing about it. The absence of information is information. ~ Ender”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“It’s easy to manipulate your children when they’re absolutely sure you’re stupid.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“It’s the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn’t have the good fortune to be born Homo sapiens.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“I’ve had your tears with mine, and you’ve had mine with yours. I think that’s more intimate even than a kiss.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“Just one more example of why a commander who ruled by fear and made all the decisions himself would always be beaten, sooner or later.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Let me tell you about Ender. He’s all about beating the other guys. Not just winning-he has to beat the other guy into the ground or he isn’t happy.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Life is a suicide course, Miro. Check it out- basic philosophy course. You spend your life running out of fuel and when you’re finally out, you croak.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“Living men forget the lessons of the past. But the ancestors never forget.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Love and serve the sources of your strength.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“Love is random; fear is inevitable.”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“Mark my words, when a government pretends that it is the highest judge of its own actions, the result is not freedom as Jefferson says, but chaos and oppression. When he shuts religion out of government, when men of faith are not listened to, then all that remains is venality, posturing, and ambition.”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“Masters never are content with mere respect from their servants.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Maybe not a home. Maybe that won’t come until later. But I believe it will come, Mar. With your brains in this operation, how could it not?” Edimar”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“Maybe she couldn’t know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Maybe that’s all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we’re doing.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“Most scientists believe in God,” said Sel. “Certainly most of us here.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn’t you.”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“My needs are simple and few, thought Valentine. Food. Clothing. A comfortable place to sleep. And no idiots.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn’t help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do. There was no place in that list for “feel.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“No, he told himself honestly. I’ve never had real friends before. This is what it feels like. This is why people will sacrifice so many accomplishments in order to stay with their friends instead of their tasks. But I have these friends because I stayed with my task. So instead of dragging each other down, we’re building each other up. We’re not just good friends, we’re friends who do each other good.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“No, the hurts of the mind were too strange, too invisible, too magical to hope for the same kind of tolerance and help from even the best of people. It frightens me, thought DeAnne. Why should I expect others to be better than I am?”
Orson Scott Card
Lost Boys
“Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they’re telling the truth, there’s always something hidden behind their words.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“Nobody has control of anything. We’re all beggars at the throne of fate. But sometimes he has mercy!”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“Nobody wants xenocide, but if it happens, I want to make sure it’s the other guys that disappear. When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we’re talking about survival.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Nothing that is new is ever new twice. While things that are true are still true the next time; truer, in fact, because they have been tested, they have been tasted, and they are always ripe, always ready…”
Orson Scott Card
The Ships of Earth
“Now that she knew credit cards were valuable, Baba Yaga began to collect as many of them as she could.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Now…different rules of magic prevail; different words have power. Different customs are now required of everyone and you have to obey or pay. And so we all live in a world where other people hold the power, where other people are the mages who know how to whisper to different social elements and make things happen. And most of us stand around bewildered, wondering what the gods will do next to manipulate our lives.”
Orson Scott Card
Gatefather
“Of course, he didn’t know anything about these Indonesians, or why they would have been there at this moment to save his life, but the fact that they had guns and weren’t firing them at him implied that for the moment, at least, they were his dearest friends.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“Once these two had been joined together in love, or something like love; they had made two babies, and yet, only fifteen years later, the last tie between them was broken now. All lost, all gone. Nothing lasted, nothing. Even this forty-million-year world that the Oversoul had preserved as if in ice, even it would melt before the fire. Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.”
Orson Scott Card
The Memory of Earth
“Once you understand what people really want, you can’t hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can’t hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Only a fool closes the door when the wolf is already inside the barn.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Only a wise man could see my people so clearly in so short a time. Only a ruthless one would say it all out loud. Your virtue and your flaw- we need them both.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Only because of ignorance could he shape the world so fearlessly”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“Only fools think that truth disappears when the boundaries of belief are crossed.”
Orson Scott Card
The Gate Thief
“Or maybe laughter was how they pushed painful memories out of their minds. Perhaps laughter was the only way they could keep from killing each other.
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“Our lives are just our genes and our upbringing. We simply act out the script that was forced upon us.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don’t think they have any, so they don’t mind giving it up.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“People are never fair, even when they try to be…and few are the ones who try.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Red Prophet
“Power comes only by persuasion; by love and service. It comes from trying and learning.”
Orson Scott Card
Gatefather
“Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Running was the way he dreamed. Having never been in control of his life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free. He dreamed of being at the mercy of the wind, carried aloft and blown here and there, a life of true randomness instead of always being part of someone else’s purpose.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Saving the human race is a frantic one. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you’re taking part in.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“Science fiction is about what could be but isn’t; fantasy is about what couldn’t be.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“She certainly didn’t have the ability to share her ability with the envious ones—she could only share the products of her ability. They gladly took those, and then resented her for being able to produce them. Most human beings, she concluded long ago, love to worship from afar people with extraordinary ability, but prefer to have their friends be genial incompetents. And, of course, most of them get their preference.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ships of Earth
“She will look at you as women look at men, and she will judge you as a woman judge men…not on the strength of their arguments, and not in their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of their passion, their strength of soul, their compassion, and…ah, this above all…their conversation.”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That’s life. It hurts, it’s dirty, and it feels very, very good.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Since I don’t have actual authority over anybody, Petra, how can it possibly matter if I’m not legitimately authorized?”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man’s sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman’s throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer’s table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk.”
Orson Scott Card
Prentice Alvin
“So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost Boys
“So plans of attack, what good are they then? We try, we do what we can, but what really counts is what you do when command breaks down.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“So this is love, he said to himself, trying to examine his own overwhelming feelings with the rational fragment of his mind. This is the powerful, horrible longing that made Mother marry that miserable tyrant I had to call Father. How many unbelievably stupid heroes in stories did insanely dangerous things because they were in love? More to the pint, how many insane things am I going to do because of it?”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“So when war can’t be avoided, you fight in such a way as to reveal to the enemy how war is destroying him. When he finally sees it, he stops.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadows in Flight
“So you’re coming along with me, increasing our risk of being identified and allowing Achilles to get his two worst nemeses with one well-placed bomb, in order to save my life?”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they’ve been given.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“Sometime or other everybody wishes everybody would go away. Sometimes I’ll wish you would go away. What I’m telling you now is that even at those times, even if I tell you to go away, you don’t have to go away.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“Sometimes you have to trust people enough to let them succeed and love them enough to let them fail.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“Sometimes, what’s right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“That was Ender’s gift to us, to free us from the illusion that any one explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, always more to learn.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“That was the difference between her and the idiots of the world. They were all trying to look smart and keep their social standing. Whereas Valentine didn’t care about social standing, she cared about getting it right. Getting the truth—when the truth was gettable.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“That was the difference between her and the idiots of the world. They were all trying to look smart and keep their social standing. Whereas Valentine didn’t care about social standing, she cared about getting it right. Getting the truth.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“That’s how war is fought, in case any of you have foolish ideas to the contrary. You don’t fight with minimum force, you fight with maximum force at endurable cost. You don’t just pink your enemy, you don’t even bloody him, you destroy his capability to fight back. It’s the strategy you use with diseases.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“That’s the way of the world: The princess can disappear, but the witch is forever.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“That’s what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn’t stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.”
Orson Scott Card
The Memory of Earth
“The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world. She had been alive, and so she knew now that her electronic dwelling-place gave her only a fraction of a life.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“The bigger a man is, the more people he serves,” said the Prophet. “A small man serves himself. Bigger is to serve your family. Bigger is to serve your tribe. Then your people. Biggest of all, to serve all men, and all lands.”
Orson Scott Card
Prentice Alvin
“The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling themselves against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“The child is mine and Petra’s. It’s especially important to us because it’s the first we know of that definitely does not have my condition.” “You mean it isn’t ugly?”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“The cruelest, narrowest, most evil people will always rise to power because they’ll always be the ones most willing to wrap themselves in the crescent flag and murder people in God’s name.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“The devil takes his victories,” the man replied, “wherever men of God lose heart, and leave the field to him.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“The devil?” Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. “Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was.” Jason smiled. “But he meant well.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
The Worthing Saga
“The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“The emotion she could deal with best was anger.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“The future happiness of the human race depends on good people who want to live at peace with their neighbors, and who are willing to protect their neighbors from those who don’t want peace.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“The Hegemon was a companion piece, really, to The Hive Queen. The one book was the story of an entire species; and so was the other.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“The human need to leave something of yourself behind is universal.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“The leader only has as much power as his followers give him.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“The limbic node deep in her brain didn’t understand that she no longer lived in a tree, no longer had to panic when she felt herself to be falling.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadows in Flight
“The little bitch. She didn’t have her files in another computer. She kept everything she knew inside her head.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy.”
Orson Scott Card
Maps in a Mirror
“The novelty and freshness you’ll bring to the field won’t come from the new ideas you think up. Truly new ideas are rare, and usually turn out to be variations on old themes anyway. No, your freshness will come from the way you think, from the person you are; it will inevitably show up in your writing, provided you don’t mask it with heavy-handed formulas or clichés.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“The only profit from their sojourn on Earth would be the memory of this mad species, which had somehow become intelligent without ever learning how to understand themselves.”
Orson Scott Card
The Abyss
“The plant had likely been there for over a century, Wila knew, sprouting new petals every season and surrounding the temple with its pleasant perfume. So beautiful, she thought, and yet so resilient. Am I not stronger than a flower?”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“The problem was, the people who should shut up were the ones talking the most.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“The prospect of sharing the rest of their lives held no dread for them. . . every word and movement between them carried their history and their future like background movement, shaping each moment even when they weren’t aware of it.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“The secret is not to avoid learning useless knowledge. It’s to make use of whatever knowledge you have.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species’ most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“The task of the tyrant is not to compel, but to persuade even the unwilling that compliance better serves their interest than resistance.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“The trick of it was finding a way to let new things into one’s life without killing that life to accommodate them.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“The trouble was, innovation never resulted in victory over the long term. It was too easy for the enemy to imitate and improve on your innovations.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“The trouble with coins is, when one face is up, the other face is down.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that’s possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author’s mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That’s cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it – but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“The war on apathy moved much slower than real wars fought on the ground.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“Then they, too, lay down on mattresses stuffed with straw, hearing the music of the flies to buzz them to sleep, holding each other’s hands as they dozed, thinking of the miracles by which love works its will in the world.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Then you’re hired, Lieutenant. I can abide a life outside the IF, but I can’t abide life without my wife’s stir-fry.”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“There are hundreds of possible causes for every effect, and a hundred possible effects for every cause.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“There are so many powerful people in this world who refuse to see any vision they didn’t think of.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“There is nothing so stupid or dangerous or painful that people won’t eagerly do it, if by doing it they will make others believe they are better or stronger or more honorable. I have seen people poison themselves, destroy their children, abandon their mates, cut themselves off from the world, all so that others would think they were a better sort of person.”
Orson Scott Card
The Worthing Saga
“There is nothing that doesn’t decay. Some things decay more slowly than others, that’s all.”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“There is only try and try again, until you can persuade the world to work according to your new plan for it. … Everything has a mind of its own and follows the laws it already understands.”
Orson Scott Card
Gatefather
“There was some enthusiasm for a Caliban village, but it quickly dissipated when people contemplated a future village school and what the mascot might look like.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“There’s no fear of future in the song of life, just the ever-joyful present moment.”
Orson Scott Card
Red Prophet
“There’s no part of the ceremony where the priest, acting in the place of God, warns the guests not to murder the bridegroom because it might jeopardize the succession.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“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.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“They feel very stupid and strange, the things going through your mind. You’re making us very tired, with all your thinking of stupid imaginary impossible things.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“They gave us the stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them. They gave us everything.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“They were trying to get human beings to define themselves as all belonging to one tribe. It had happened briefly when they were threatened by creatures who truly were strangers; then the human race had felt itself to be one people, and united in order to repel an enemy. And the moment victory was achieved, it all fell apart, and long-”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“This is the most important thing the humans have taught me. The thing they’re teaching us right now. You see, they are all strangers to each other. They live out their entire lives, never truly understanding one another, only making guesses, making mistakes, distorting, deceiving, misunderstanding each other. And yet, though they’re permanently strangers, they choose sometimes to trust each other, care for each other so completely that they gladly die to let the other live–that they gladly change themselves to make the other person happy.”
Orson Scott Card
The Abyss
“This is war, Father. I will never be free of you as long as you own this company and I am under your employ. I am done playing your little life lessons. It’s time I taught you a few of my own.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.”
Orson Scott Card
Maps in a Mirror
“To reach out to you when I’m in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.”
Orson Scott Card
Pathfinder
“True implies that you have found a connection that exists independent of your apprehension of it, that would exist whether you noticed it or not.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can’t possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“Until you know that you’re tougher than the enemy, you maneuver, you don’t commit to battle.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Verily joined in. “My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn’t you.”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“Violence was what the military existed for. Controlled violence directed against appropriate targets.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“Was good enough when good men held the office, but always when you create an office that a man can lay hands on, an evil man will someday lay hands on it.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“Wasn’t that the definition of adulthood? That you wanted one thing, but did another because you knew what was right and good, and wanted to do the right and the good more than you wanted to do what you wanted.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadows in Flight
“We are who we are. When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“We suddenly find ourselves afflicted with peace, you see. Always a disaster for those whose careers have not reached their natural apex.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.” (Orson Scott Card Quotes)
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“We’re businessmen, Chubs. The moral high ground is wherever we set it.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Unaware
“What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“What could go wrong… Doing some stupid impulsive thing that caused the death of drowthers was practically a family tradition.”
Orson Scott Card
The Lost Gate
“What good were the rules of time when the rules of magic contradicted them.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“What I have lived by is this: Whatever I need to know, and don’t, I must learn. And if learning it fights against my natural inclinations, then it’s all the more important that I learn it anyway.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“What I want,” he said softly, “is to stand in this meadow and walk in the light of the sun.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadows in Flight
“What I’m telling you is, there’s some people who do things so bad it tears at the fabric of the world, and then there’s some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn.”
Orson Scott Card
Lost Boys
“What kind of rescue is this, where you toss the prisoner a knife and stand and wait to see what happens?”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“What we’ve done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“When a government pretends that it is the highest judge of its own actions, the result is not freedom as Jefferson says, but chaos and oppression.”
Orson Scott Card
Heartfire
“When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Afire
“When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ships of Earth
“When the people elected a president like this one, who ran a campaign like the one he ran, it was hard to imagine what kind of scandal might bring him down.”
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
“When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.”
Orson Scott Card
The Gate Thief
“When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself.”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“When you love people, you do whatever it takes to make them happy.”
Orson Scott Card
The Worthing Saga
“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
“Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“Who else but a pacifist would attack somebody as little as Wiggin?”
Orson Scott Card
A War of Gifts
“Who was more cursed, the one who died, unknowing until the very moment of his death, or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?”
Orson Scott Card
The Ender Quintet
“Why did he hesitate? He finally admitted to himself that he was like an American child who was almost completely certain about Santa Claus, but dared not ask for fear the answer would lead to the end of the annual largesse of Christmas.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“Why do we persist in this divided idiocy? Because the world is full of prideful bastards, that’s why. Everyone believes they’re smarter than everyone else, more capable than everyone else, more justified than everyone else. Humility went extinct a long time ago.”
Orson Scott Card
Earth Awakens
“Why do you say that I am alone? My body is with me wherever I am, telling me endless stories of hunger and satisfaction, weariness and sleep, eating and drinking and breathing and life. With such company who could ever be alone?”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“Why is it that the people who should be in authority are usually the people who don’t want it, while the people who hold authority are usually the two-faced schemers who’ve stepped on people’s backs to get it?”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“Why should I worry about uncreating so much of human history? Why should I care that it will be worse than forgotten, that it will be unknown? Why should that seem to be a crime, when all of human history is an eyeblink compared to the billions of years the stars have shone?”
Orson Scott Card
Pastwatch
“Witchcraft and wizardry had so effectively been denied that his own powers began to weaken, for there were few who contributed to his strength by invoking his name.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“Yes, he was alone, but he needed to be alone; until now, he had not really understood how painful and heavy it was to have the needs of others always in his heart and on his mind.”
Orson Scott Card
Ruins
“Yet if he lost that desire, who would he be ? What would be in his heart then, if she were gone from it ?”
Orson Scott Card
The Gate Thief
“Yet in your stories, you must imagine all these things, not just because it will make the world of your story more complete, but also because the very completeness of the world will transform your story and make it far more truthful. As your characters move through a more complex world, they will have to respond with greater subtlety and flexibility; the constant surprises they run into will also surprise the reader – and you!”
Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
“You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you’ll accomplish, and nothing more.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“You can tell a lie now and then, but what happens to you when you try to live your whole life inside a lie?”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“You can’t alter your DNA and meet that expectation, so get over it. You are what you are.”
Orson Scott Card
The Swarm
“You can’t defeat a powerful enemy unless you understand him completely, and you can’t understand him unless you know the desires of his heart, and you can’t know the desires of his heart until you truly love him.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets
“You can’t rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow
“You consider everything impossible unless you want it, and then it already belongs to you, in which case anyone who stands in your way is a thief.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Fleet
“You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon
“You don’t want to give God the credit because you don’t think he exists. But if you’re going to blame him for all the crap, kid, you got to give him credit for what grows from that fertilized soil.”
Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant
“You get used to being naked, that’s the first thing that Ivan discovered. Crashing through thick brush with branches snagging at your bare skin, you stop worrying about who’s looking and and spend your time trying to keep yourself from being flayed alive. He got shy again when they entered the village, but once he decided simply to let the gawkers gawk, he found himself much more interested in what he was seeing than what they were.”
Orson Scott Card
Enchantment
“You only feel that way because the boy you love is not aware enough of his own feelings to make things clear to you or even to himself.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile
“You really are the stupidest smart kid in the world,” said Mother.”
Orson Scott Card
A War of Gifts
“You talk so sweet I bet you have to suck on salt for half an hour to get the taste of sugar out of your mouth.”
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
“You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn’t know. We made sure you didn’t know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It’s what you were born for.”
Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
“You’re just Ender in drag, doing his Valentine bit. You come off the stage and there’s nothing there, it comes off like makeup and a costume.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
“You’re very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can’t really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I’m all the more in need of good advice, since I can’t actually conceive of needing any.”
Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind
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