Orson Scott Card Quotes

609 Sourced Quotes

I own the whole world, and folks haven't been keeping up too well on the payments.

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

Orson Scott Card
For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

Orson Scott Card
He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends.

Orson Scott Card
You never needed anybody.
If you had ever bothered to come to know me, you'd know that that is the exact opposite of the truth.
Well, well. So we part in utter ignorance of each other.

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.

Orson Scott Card
The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that other people will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream.

Orson Scott Card
I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game.

Orson Scott Card
Don't press her, said Cooper. If someone decides to leave something unsaid, my experience is that everyone is happier if they don't insist on his saying it.

Orson Scott Card
Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.

Orson Scott Card
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

Orson Scott Card
How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?

Orson Scott Card
She can't help her red skin, and she isn't heathen. In fact, she's a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder.

Orson Scott Card
That's the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own.

Orson Scott Card
Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and... now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement." It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.

Orson Scott Card
That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.

Orson Scott Card
You killed more people than anybody in history." "Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.

Orson Scott Card
With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.

Orson Scott Card
People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

Orson Scott Card
Wouldn't it have been better to change humanity so it no longer desired to destroy itself?

Orson Scott Card
What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he's done, and that's as good as any man ever gets.

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
How could I hurt her? She'd have to love me before I could do that.

Orson Scott Card
You aren't the kind of guy who takes the law into his own hands. You left the law in other hands and it screwed you over pretty badly.

Orson Scott Card
She don't set no store to see a king. Her pa a king back in Africa, and they shoot him dead. Them Portuguese slavers show her what it mean to be a king—it mean you die quick like everybody, and spill blood red like everybody, and cry out loud in pain and scared—oh, fine to be a king, and fine to see one. Do them White folk believe this lie?

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
Was it worth it? To lose part of who he had been in order to live free? Perhaps this new self was better than the old.

Orson Scott Card
[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there.

Orson Scott Card
In the absence of understanding, that was a good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were. Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy? Was there really any difference?

Orson Scott Card
I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

Orson Scott Card