Orson Scott Card Quotes

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“The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.”

“yesterday someone sent a message that was signed GOD! bernard said.
really? dap said. i didn't know he was signed onto the system”

“Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.”

“I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.”

“The society whose citizens are willing to stand and fight is the one with the best chance of surviving long enough for history to even notice.”

“I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.”

“Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.”

“Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.”

“This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.”

“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.”

“Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.”

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

“because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.”

“Nobodys life ever goes according to plan.
So why do we keep on planning?
Because that's how we know who we are. By what we intend to be. By what we try to become.
And fail.
I don't say 'fail'. I saw we aim and miss. But we still hit something.”

“Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.”

“Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.”

“there were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.”

“The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.”

“Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?”

“Today, Mr. Darcy is a vampire.”

“We've devoted our lives to learning about them!" Miro said.

Ender stopped. "Not from them.”

“So I want to ask you a hypothetical question.

My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.”

“I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.”

“Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.”

“Then you're dead, too, sweet little sister.'
Oh, yes,' said Valentine. 'They'll believe that. "I didn't know it would kill Andrew. And when he was dead, I didn't know it will kill Valentine too.”

“Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.”

“Quim," she said, "don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there, and you've seen nothing but a map.”

“Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty.”

“Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.”

“It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.”

“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”

“I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.”

“I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.”

“Bonzo, he pre-cise. He so careful, he piss on a plate and never splash.”

“One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”

“Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I'm old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.”

“Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.”

“If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.”

“Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.”

“Good people aren't good because they never cause harm to others. They're good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have.”

“You who speak languages, you are such liars.”

“Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.” “That’s a lie.” “No. It’s just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.”

“But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?”

“But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.”

“He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.”

“If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out.”

“I looked for perfection, and I found something better.”

“The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet.”

“A character is what he does, yes - but even more, a character is what he means to do.”