Orson Scott Card Quotes

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

Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

~ Orson Scott Card

You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.

~ Orson Scott Card

You're a monster.Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?No, just a medal. The budget isn't inexhaustable.

~ Orson Scott Card

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

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

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

~ Orson Scott Card

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

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

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

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

Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.

~ Orson Scott Card

With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.

~ Orson Scott Card

The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.

~ Orson Scott Card

Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.

~ Orson Scott Card

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

~ Orson Scott Card

We have to go. I'm almost happy here.

~ Orson Scott Card

Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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

It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.

~ Orson Scott Card

I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.

~ Orson Scott Card

someone's senta loving notein lines of returning geeseand as the moon fillsmy western chamberas petals danceover the flowing streamagain I think of youthe two of usliving a sadnessaparta hurt that can't be removedyet when my gaze comes downmy heart stays up

~ Orson Scott Card

Faith doesn't mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.

~ Orson Scott Card

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

~ Orson Scott Card

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of. But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

~ Orson Scott Card

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

~ Orson Scott Card

When you have faith in something a lot of other people believe then you a member of the church said Ceas, When you have faith in something nobody believes, then you a complete wacko

~ Orson Scott Card

[No single] explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, ALWAYS more to learn.

~ Orson Scott Card

I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.

~ Orson Scott Card

You frighten me, when you say there isn't time.I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.But it keeps not ending.So far, so good.

~ Orson Scott Card

You were baptized?My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it. The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in.

~ Orson Scott Card

And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor

~ Orson Scott Card

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. Food only looks good to a hungry man.

~ Orson Scott Card