Orson Scott Card famous quotes

Madness, and then illumination.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Illumination #Madness

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Work #Garden #Getting High

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

#Inspirational #World #Changing The World

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Writing #Editing #Space

Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Judging #People

The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Wise #Mistake

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Live Life #Mean #Fiction

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

#Children #Childhood #Today

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Book #Writing #Heart

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Men #Pigs #Democracy

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Writing #Past #Ideas

She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Hurt #Pain #Dirty

Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?
-- Orson Scott Card

#Grief #Thinking #Ungrateful

Do the gods of different nations talk to each other?...Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other's worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: "Are there any who can honestly boast, My worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives?
-- Orson Scott Card

#Sacrifice #Simple #Thinking

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Enemy #Defeat #Moments

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

#Real #Fiction #World

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Writing #Impact #Stories

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Believe #Thinking #Want

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending-the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Opposites #Happy Endings #Sometimes

Faith doesn't mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Mean #Doubt

Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.
-- Orson Scott Card

#People #May #Miserable

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Love #Believe #Thinking

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Thinking #Mind #Surprise

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Stupid #Way #Causes

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Boyfriend #Children #Father

We have to go. I'm almost happy here.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Happiness

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

#Hypocrisy #Choices #Important

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Humanity #Doe #Brilliant

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Prayer #Thinking #Romance

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Lying #Stories

If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Weapons #Lethal Weapon

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Children #Book #Giving

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Home #Enemy

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, 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

#Pain #Forever #Doubt

I taught you everything you know. But I didn't teach you everything I know.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Taught #Teach

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Change #Learning #Order

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Military #Order #Decision

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Today #Enough

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Community #Persons

When there aren't any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Stupid #Smart #Decision

He's not a killer. He just wins... Thoroughly
-- Orson Scott Card

#Winning #Killers #Killing

the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Wise #Roots #People

America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Fashion #Believe #America

You frighten me, when you say there isn't time." "I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia." "But it keeps not ending." "So far, so good.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Christian #End Of The World #Expecting

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

#Pain #Who I Am #Long

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

#Philosophy #Thinking #Class

There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you
-- Orson Scott Card

#Hate #Hate You #Stop Hating

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Pain #Book #Writing

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Children #Government #Law

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

#Writing #Important #Stories

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Errors #Essence #Training

You have to measure your success by the way your audience responds to your games. No matter how small that audience is, it's yours. Your game is part of the lives and the memories of those people in a way that WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Windows can never be.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Memories #Games #People

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Doe #Storytelling #Values

I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Giving #Honor #Dignity

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Memories #Mean #Thinking

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Believe #What Matters #Fiction

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

#Inspirational #Life #Identity

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Mind #Desire #Stories

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Lying #Sometimes #Dependable

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

#Women #Men #Blow

Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you
-- Orson Scott Card

#Love Is #About Yourself #Persons

Early to bed and early to rise," Mazer intoned, "makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Stupid #Eye #Men

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction
-- Orson Scott Card

#Real #Thinking #Self

Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Grief #People #Degrees

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Parenting #Silence #Prized Possessions

Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Ender #Poke

It is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Essence #Desire #Dignity

Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Heart #Battle #Warfare

I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Hurt #Lying #People

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

#Thinking #Giving #People

I don't know a soul who doesn't maintain two separate lists of doctrines the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Believe #Two #Soul

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

#Fiction #Truth Is #Reason

The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them―noticing them―that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The part of the man's statement that was true, however, was about the uselessness of speaking up. If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Teacher #Mistake #Believe

And yet.. even if you had been right, it would only have been by accident. A broken clock is right two times a day.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Two #Broken #Clock

Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?
-- Orson Scott Card

#Two #Two Sides #Sides

A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Fiction #Needs #Fantasy

The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Teacher #Enemy

So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.
-- Orson Scott Card

#War

How short life is for fools.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Short Life #Fool #How Short Life Is

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

#Imagination #Tragedy #Body

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

#Slave #Rejoice

Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Brother #Giving #Easy

What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Thinking #Laughing #People

The Lord took twice the time making thee, Alvin Smith, cause it took that long to put the mischief in.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Time #Long #Causes

I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right
-- Orson Scott Card

#Time #Lying #Love You

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

#People #Reason #Gallows

As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Adversity #Long #Born

If the Church has no the authority to tell its members that they may not engage in homosexual practices, then it has no authority at all. And if we accept the argument of the hypocrites of homosexuality that their sin is not a sin, we have destroyed ourselves.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Hypocrite #Practice #Church

There is a myth that homosexuals are 'born that way,' and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Thinking #Ideas #People

Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Law #Government #Enemy

Legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples. It's about giving the Left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Religious #Children #Couple

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Time #Culture #Vices

Let's fly away and live forever
-- Orson Scott Card

#Forever #Fly Away #Live Forever

O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!
-- Orson Scott Card

#Son #Men #Knowing

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Children #Ideas #Care

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.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Real #Eye #Hunger

He walked down the corridor, lined with his soldiers, who looked at him with love, with awe, with trust. Except Bean, who looked at him with anguish. Ender Wiggin was not larger than life, Bean knew. He was exactly life-sized, and so his larger-than-life burden was too much for him. And yet he was bearing it. So far.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Soldier #Too Much #Larger Than Life

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Boys #Want #Kind

...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Inspirational #Brother #Down And

He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we have forgotten him.
-- Orson Scott Card

#Forgotten