Orson Scott Card Quotes

He splashed into the water, his whole body, not with the reverent attitude of prayer, but with a desperate thirst; he buried his head under the water and drank deep, with his cheek against the cold stone of the riverbed, the water tumbling over his back, his calves. He drank and drank, lifted his head and shoulders above the water to gasp in the evening air, and then collapsed into the water again, to drink as greedily as before.It was a kind of prayer, though, he realized as he emerged, freezing cold as the water evaporated from his skin in the breeze of the dark morning.I am with you, he said to the Oversoul. I'll do whatever you ask, because I long for you to accomplish your purpose here.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

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

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.

~ Orson Scott Card

From you I can learn things that nobody knows.

~ Orson Scott Card

I've learned all I'm ever going to learn from you.

~ Orson Scott Card

You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.

~ Orson Scott Card

The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.

~ Orson Scott Card

we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they’re workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we’re on the right track.

~ Orson Scott Card

Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.

~ Orson Scott Card

We are only human when we are part of a community. ... I tried to isolate you, but it could not be done. I surrounded you with hostility; you took most of your enemies and rivals and made friends of them. ... You were a part of them; they carried you inside them all their lives.

~ Orson Scott Card

I believe what Jesus said was, 'I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive. But of you it is required that you forgive all men.

~ Orson Scott Card

Achilles might be a good papa to the family, but he was also a killer, and he never forgives.Poke knew that, though. Bean warned her, and she knew it, but she chose Achilles for their papa anyway. Chose him and then died for it. She was like that Jesus that Helga preached about in her kitchen while they ate. She died for her people. And Achilles, he was like God. He made people pay for their sins no matter what they did.The important thing is, stay on the good side of God. That's what Helga teaches, isn't it? Stay right with God.I'll stay right with Achilles. I'll honor my papa, that's for sure, so I can stay alive until I'm old enough to go out on my own.

~ Orson Scott Card

So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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

The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure, grief did not obliterate joy.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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

Everything we do means something.

~ Orson Scott Card

Maybe that's who you are, what you remember.

~ Orson Scott Card

O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not.

~ Orson Scott Card

Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier then he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.

~ Orson Scott Card

But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.

~ Orson Scott Card

I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two.The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew.The changeless part was always true, The growing part was always new,And I wondered, when the tale was through, Which part was me, and which was you.

~ Orson Scott Card

Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her, it was so different that it was not even the same event.

~ Orson Scott Card

who would expect less? she said. You're a Wiggin. Whatever that means. He said. It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.

~ Orson Scott Card

I'm hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what's going to happen next, so you always have to be ready for anything, ready to improvise, determined to win no matter what. I'm also making you miserable.

~ Orson Scott Card

Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn't figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. If God loved them so much and he could do whatever he wanted, then why wasn't there more food for these kids? And if God just wanted them dead, why didn't he let them die sooner or not even be born at all, so they didn't have to go to so much trouble and get all excited about trying to be alive when he was just going to take them to his heart. None of it made any sense to Bean, and the more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?

~ Orson Scott Card

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

We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on

~ Orson Scott Card

Because human nature never changes.

~ Orson Scott Card

Your motivation has to be rock solid. You have to want it so bad that even th threat of death won't take it from you.

~ Orson Scott Card

A person is what he says and does, that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.

~ Orson Scott Card

Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes.So God uses wicked people as his tools?God gives us the freedom to 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.So, in the long run, God always wins?Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.

~ Orson Scott Card

Come in, Bean. Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.

~ Orson Scott Card