Orson Scott Card

“We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.”

“Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.”

“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.”

“All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”

“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.”

“Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.”

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

“You're a monster.Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?No, just a medal. The budget isn't inexhaustable.”

“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. ”

“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”

“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”

“Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?”

“Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet.”

“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”

“Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.”

“Remember, the enemy's gate is down.”

“Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty."Gideon Wyeth:"Why?"Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.”

“But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this. To see what could be, and to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. And when a life ends as mine will end, no one can persuade me that the cost was not worth what it has brought me at last.”

“Today, Mr. Darcy is a vampire.”

“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”

“You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.”

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

“Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.”

“Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you”

“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.”

“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 ”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.”

“We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.”

“She will look at you as women look at men, and she will judge you as a woman judge men...not on the strength of their arguments, and not in their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of their passion, their strength of soul, their compassion, and...ah, this above all...their conversation.”

“None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.”

“Early to bed and early to rise," Mazer intoned, "makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.”

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." -Taleswapper ”

“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?”

“Into the the air, into the earth, into the fire, I am with you.”

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.”

“Thank God for you, Ender. Thank God.”

“To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you.”

“Madness, and then illumination.”

“And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.”