110+ Orson Scott Card Quotes (Imaginative, Epic And Thoughtful)

Orson Scott Card is an American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist, and columnist. He is best known for his science fiction novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead, both of which won Hugo and Nebula Awards. He has also written fantasy, historical fiction, and contemporary fiction.

Top 10 Orson Scott Card Quotes

1. Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
2. I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it
3. Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.
4. I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid.
5. We're like the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, then eat the little brats alive.
6. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
7. 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
8. Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.
9. One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?
10. Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.

Orson Scott Card Image Quotes

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

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

Orson Scott Card Short Quotes

• Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
• Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
• It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.
• Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
• You can't change what you don't understand.
• No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing.
• The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.
• All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better— So why do I hate my life?
• This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?
• Once you have the gallows, you'll find new reasons to hang people from it.

Orson Scott Card Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible. — Orson Scott Card

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth. — Orson Scott Card

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

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools. — Orson Scott Card

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No matter how sexually attracted a man might be toward other men, or a woman toward other women, and no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be within same-sex couples, there is no act of court or Congress that can make these relationships the same as the coupling between a man and a woman. — Orson Scott Card

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky. — Orson Scott Card

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault. — Orson Scott Card

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport. — Orson Scott Card

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

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

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them. — Orson Scott Card

There's no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don't, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't hang out with them. — Orson Scott Card

That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes. — Orson Scott Card

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

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. — Orson Scott Card

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

Unfortunately, we live in a time when the media are almost a monoculture. — Orson Scott Card

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration. — Orson Scott Card

Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price. — Orson Scott Card

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

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community. — Orson Scott Card

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. — Orson Scott Card

In order to learn, one must change one's mind. — 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

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. — Orson Scott Card

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going. — Orson Scott Card

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

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

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. — Orson Scott Card

This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?" "I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?" "Yes," she said. "That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours. — Orson Scott Card

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice. — Orson Scott Card

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins. — Orson Scott Card

I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse. — Orson Scott Card

One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war. — Orson Scott Card

Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women. — Orson Scott Card

So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind. — Orson Scott Card

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you. — 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

It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. — Orson Scott Card

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. — Orson Scott Card

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes. — Orson Scott Card

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. — Orson Scott Card

Madness, and then illumination. — Orson Scott Card

...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

I merely observe that all living things are manipulated. As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted. — Orson Scott Card

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. — Orson Scott Card

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. — Orson Scott Card

This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question. — Orson Scott Card

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. — Orson Scott Card

'I could kill you like this,' Peter whispered. 'Just press and press until you're dead'. — Orson Scott Card

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing. — Orson Scott Card

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

Remember, the enemy's gate is down. — Orson Scott Card

It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others. — Orson Scott Card

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

Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won? — Orson Scott Card

I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first. - Ender — Orson Scott Card

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

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

A library is the first step of a thousand journeys, portal to a thousand worlds. — 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

The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. — Orson Scott Card

If you give orders and explain nothing, you might get obedience, but you'll get no creativity. If you tell them your purpose, then when your original plan is shown to be faulty, they'll find another way to achieve your goal. Explaining to your men doesn't weaken their respect for you, it proves your respect for them. — Orson Scott Card

Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins. — Orson Scott Card

He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him. — Orson Scott Card

In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world. — Orson Scott Card

Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again. — Orson Scott Card

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

As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generaitons, giving brith to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire...I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free excpet when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you're good for. — Orson Scott Card

Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable. — Orson Scott Card

Never mind that the story had turned out to be lies and foolishness—there was always folks stupid enough to say, Where there's smoke there's fire, when the saying should have been, Where there's scandalous lies there's always malicious believers and spreaders-around, regardless of evidence. — Orson Scott Card

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone. — Orson Scott Card

Humanity does not ask to be happy.It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it... Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, , but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing. — Orson Scott Card

The only way to learn is by changing your mind. — Orson Scott Card

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

I didn't want to see you." "They told me." "I was afraid that I'd still love you." "I hoped that you would. — Orson Scott Card

Life Lessons by Orson Scott Card

1. Orson Scott Card teaches us to have faith in ourselves and to never give up on our dreams, no matter how hard the journey may seem.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting different perspectives, as well as the power of empathy.
3. Finally, he encourages us to take risks and to be open to new experiences, as this is the only way to truly grow and develop.