Orson Scott Card quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Orson Scott Card on Wise Famous Quotes.

I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.

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

Didn't Jesus say something disparaging about casting pearls before swine?

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

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

the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. I

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.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

To stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make the person stop wanting to do it.

Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins - thoroughly.

You honor our humble abode,' said Bean.
'I do, don't I,' said Peter with a smile.

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.

I'm never impossible. The most I ever allow myself is to be somewhat unlikely.

some wounds aren't so easily healed.

Anton: "You're asking me?"
Sister Carlotta: "God not being convenient, I ask a fellow mortal.

don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there, and you've seen nothing but the map.

There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.

He always told the truth, but he didn't always tell it all.

You might change the props
and the actors, the play of human history is always the same

Sickness and healing are in every heart; death and deliverance in every hand.

How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out.

A library is the first step of a thousand journeys, portal to a thousand worlds.

Russians are never more cooperative than when they are about to betray you.

Life is a suicide mission.

I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.

But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong.

Children couldn't stomach the truth, adults believed. Children had to be protected from the harsh realities of the world.

Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they'd leave me alone.

Nonsense," said Graff. "Ender always has plans within plans.

Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it.
Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed.

Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart ...

A man who embraces the voice of evil when it whispers in his ear is no less evil than the whisperer.

The enemy may outgun us, but they will never outthink us.

That's why he hates you, because you didn't suffer when he tried to punish you.

Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing.

I'm crazy," said Ender. "But I think I'm OK.

Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others.

When I am drunk I am at my best. It is the national knack of the French.

Knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.

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

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.

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.

Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.

Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they'd say on television later.

It's laugh or cry," said Rigg.
"Cry then. Give the old man his due.

[H]e had come to work for what the fee could buy, and not for joy of the work itself.

'I could kill you like this,' Peter whispered. 'Just press and press until you're dead'.

The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.

Ah, Vitaly, we all come from Eros."
~Sel Menach

If one has to say, in an argument, "I am intelligent! I do know things!" then one might as well stop arguing.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before.

We've devoted our lives to learning about them!" Miro said.
Ender stopped. "Not from them.

It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.

The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.

Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?

Human beings remain grubs all the lives.

He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.

I'm not stupid! In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

Violence was what the military existed for. Controlled violence directed against appropriate targets.

It's like communes - people with nothing are always willing to share.

long stories in the same series (as well as a couple of stabs at mainstream stories).

Take me home, he said silently to Graff. In my dream you said you loved me. Take me home

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.

Lightspeed travel between worlds had let him skip like a stone over the surface of time.

The clay can become a bear," she said, "but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank.

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

As far as the rest of the biosphere is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But

I have tasted the heat of stars, and all of them are sweet.

Stories are invented as you go along...

but you can't preserve at all.

There are so many powerful people in this world who refuse to see any vision they didn't think of.

So it's Mr. Wiggin and Who The Hell Are You.'
'About right,' Bean replied.

[T]hat's the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back.

Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance.

And all I managed, barely, was endurance.

There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.

How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?

I've thought of all the questions," said Father.
"That only means you've stopped trying to think of new ones.

You really are playing God." "I most certainly am not playing.

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.

Once you have the gallows, you'll find new reasons to hang people from it.

Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.

We're all trying to decide wether your scores are up there are a miricule or a mistake.
a habit

Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing.

If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine.
And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.

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

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.

... I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.

We need you to help us figure out how you can help us.

I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.

When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.

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.

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

Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

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

People get used to anything, if it just goes on.

And anyway most people are idiots. They don't care about the why. They only care about what threatens them.