Orson Scott Card Quotes

609 Sourced Quotes

Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.

Orson Scott Card
Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

Orson Scott Card
I immediately felt so comfortable there. Or if not comfortable, at least willing to bear the discomforts because they fit the awkward places in my heart.

Orson Scott Card
Land was what they wanted, as if the mere ownership of dirt could turn a peasant into a squire.

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
Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn't quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?

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
"'Waterloo was won,'" quoted Rackham, "'on the playing fields of Eton.'"
"What the hell does that mean?" asked Carn Carby. "You never even went to Eton."
"It was an analogy," said Rackham. "If you hadn't spent your entire childhood playing war games, you'd actually know something. You're all so uneducated."

Orson Scott Card
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
Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.

Orson Scott Card
Even in cultures where marriages are arranged by parents, you're never actually forbidden to fall in love with your mate.

Orson Scott Card
It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor... I fought to win.

Orson Scott Card
My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.

Orson Scott Card
I want to know how many years I got.
Many, said Ta-Kumsaw. Or few. All that matters is what you do with however many years you have.

Orson Scott Card
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
We don't admit it to ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment, we see all life before us and we understand how we chose, every day of our lives, the manner of our death.

Orson Scott Card
Most of the things people say they remember they only imagine anyways.

Orson Scott Card
It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?

Orson Scott Card
Whoop-de-do," said Ram. "What?" "I'm celebrating." "Was that irony or loss of mental function?" asked the expendable. "Was that a rhetorical questions, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?" "I have no confidence in you, Ram," said the expendable. "Well, thanks." "You're welcome.

Orson Scott Card
Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth.

Orson Scott Card
The most evil creatures don't desire the destruction of everything—they only desire to exploit it for themselves.

Orson Scott Card
She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus.
Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me.

Orson Scott Card
Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive.

Orson Scott Card
He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.

Orson Scott Card
So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.

Orson Scott Card
As he had so many times before, Taleswapper addressed a few silent words to God, which always came down to this question: Why do you put us to so much trouble, when it all comes to naught in the end?... And, as usual, God had nothing much to say to Taleswapper when his questioning was done.

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.

Orson Scott Card
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
Justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all.

Orson Scott Card
No, no, no, Hooch told himself silently. Getting even don't amount to nothing in this world. Getting even only gets you behind. The best revenge is to get rich enough to make them all call you sir, that's how you get even with these boys.

Orson Scott Card