Quotes from Orson Scott Card

I'll accept that for now because there's a limit to how deeply I want to wade into your bullshit,' said Dimak.

The world is full of grief - to the exact degree we allow ourselves to love other people. (Mazer Rackham)

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.

Test can't messure what really matters.

Ender leaned his head against the wall of the corridor and cried until the bus came. I am just like Peter. Take my monitor away, and I am just like Peter.

It [seed of doubt] made Ender listen to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

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

We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we "understand." Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.

it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.

He thought of half a dozen ideas before he went to sleep. Ender would be pleased-every one of them was stupid.

But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they'd risk a shuttle and it's crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.

Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.

There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.

it's often the ideas that sound most absurd and counterintuitive at first that later cause fundamental shifts in the way we see the world.

It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

So that's it? asked the expendable. Final decision, said Ram. And it's the right one. Why do you think so? Because we live or die, we'll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don't make the jump, we'll learn nothing, have no new options. A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions. Shut up, said Ram.

Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they'd leave me alone.

In the silence, the bear died. It was a cute death, with funny music.

And you don't understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.

Come in, Bean. Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.

Sometime or other everybody wishes everybody would go away. Sometimes I'll wish you would go away. What I'm telling you now is that even at those times, even if I tell you to go away, you don't have to go away.

I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.

No single] explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, ALWAYS more to learn.