Orson Scott Card Quotes

609 Sourced Quotes

If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.

Orson Scott Card
A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure that anyone who opposed them must be either stupid and decieved or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.

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

Orson Scott Card
The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight.

Orson Scott Card
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

Orson Scott Card
It's about me, or people wouldn't be so anxious to keep me from knowing about it. The absence of information is information.

Orson Scott Card
I'm not a liar, sir,' she said. "'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be.

Orson Scott Card
Having never been in control of his own life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free.

Orson Scott Card
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

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

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

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

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
Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

Orson Scott Card
Stop threatening me... I've lived in terror and I've come out of it. Kill me or not, torture me or not, it doesn't matter to me. Just decide what to do.

Orson Scott Card
It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit.

Orson Scott Card
Alvin wondered if it was true—if all men had evil in their hearts, and those men as were good, maybe they were simply the ones who controlled theirselves so well they could act contrary to their heart's desire. But if that were so, then no man was good, not one.

Orson Scott Card
Around here, ma'am, if folks got they mouth open, if they ain't eating then they lying.

Orson Scott Card
We're all trying to decide whether your scores up there are a miracle or a mistake." "A habit.

Orson Scott Card
Love can't conquer anything. Love can't make a scholar into a warrior. Loving her can't make her love me.

Orson Scott Card
An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

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

Orson Scott Card