Orson Scott Card Quotes

Welcome to the human race. 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 Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don’t throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they’ve learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong- for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

~ Orson Scott Card

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

~ Orson Scott Card

The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

~ Orson Scott Card

Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?

~ Orson Scott Card

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

That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

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

Panem et Circenses translates into 'Bread and Circuses.' The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.

~ Orson Scott Card

They have influence, but no power. In my experience, influence is power.

~ Orson Scott Card

When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.

~ Orson Scott Card

That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and... I don't even know which of them is me. - Hyrum Graff

~ Orson Scott Card

Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.

~ Orson Scott Card

Stories are invented as you go along...

~ Orson Scott Card

While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights.

~ Orson Scott Card

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. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender's Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. ... _Ender's Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way ... are going to find _Ender's Game_ a very unpleasant place to live.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

Welcome to the human race. 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. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

~ Orson Scott Card

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

~ Orson Scott Card

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

~ Orson Scott Card

All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are correct. For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

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

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

~ Orson Scott Card

the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and one will ever save you.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

~ Orson Scott Card

I stole their future from them, I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

~ Orson Scott Card

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

~ Orson Scott Card

I wonder sometimes if I'm not, after all, a piece in some other player's game, following blindly his grand designs without ever knowing that my path along the board is only a feint, while the important matters are played out elsewhere by other men. But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: To see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done, then the price, one paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value. Here among the shepherds, my cup is filled with the water of life; it overflows.

~ Orson Scott Card

Hive Queen: So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them.Human: You don’t believe in God?Hive Queen: The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began.Human: You evolved. We were created.Hive Queen: By a virus.Human: By a virus that God created in order to create us.Hive Queen: So you, too, are a believer.Human: I understand belief.Hive Queen: No—you desire belief.Human: I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that’s what faith is.Hive Queen: Or deliberate insanity.

~ Orson Scott Card

You don't have to eat the entire turd to know that it's not a crab cake.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card