Orson Scott Card Quotes

609 Sourced Quotes

Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tragedy of language my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.

Orson Scott Card
To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable.

Orson Scott Card
Some people can't see miracles when they're right in the middle of them.
Better than seeing miracles that don't exist.
You're determined to stand entirely alone, aren't you?
That's where I've always stood.

Orson Scott Card
Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn't understand what real badness was.

Orson Scott Card
Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we'll be drinking Bonzo's blood water in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.

Orson Scott Card
He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.

Orson Scott Card
When you have enough money the law is a reed that will always bend your way.

Orson Scott Card
I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!

Orson Scott Card
May the day when you need courage never come.
Even as she said it, though, she knew the day would come.

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

Orson Scott Card
Mazer, i don't want to keep dreaming these things. I'm afraid to sleep. I keep thinking of things i don't want to remember. My whole life keeps playing out as if i were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life

Orson Scott Card
It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.

Orson Scott Card
I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart torn out and carried away—

Orson Scott Card
Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn't know about something bad, it wasn't happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.

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
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
[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
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
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
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
Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable.

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

Orson Scott Card
You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me.

Orson Scott Card
They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.

Orson Scott Card
The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.

Orson Scott Card
Didn't he know that when you work to destroy, you invite the Destroyer?

Orson Scott Card
What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!

Orson Scott Card
He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more.

Orson Scott Card
I don't plan to die for any cause, said Jim Bowie. Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain't noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me.

Orson Scott Card
Verily learned to live with constant deception, hiding what he was and what he saw and what he felt and what he did from everyone around him. It was only natural that he should be drawn to the study of law.

Orson Scott Card