Quotes from Orson Scott Card

Free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the casual chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.

Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier then he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.

The enemy's gate is down.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.

It was the waiting and watching that cost the most. For during that time he had to endure.

What good were the rules of time when the rules of magic contradicted them.

You were baptized? My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it. The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in.

We know everything we knew that was worth knowing, that's a crucial distinction.

Home was merely a dull ache in the back of his memory. A tiredness in his eyes.

Could you possibly be a little more incoherent? asked Olivenko. There are bits of this I'm almost understanding, and I'm sure that's not what you have in mind.

Might-have-beens are a bitch.

Strategies and formations were nice, but they were nothing if the soldiers didn't know how to handle themselves in battle.

That was Ender's gift to us, to free us from the illusion that any one explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, always more to learn.

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.

You're bigger than I remember, she said stupidly. You too, he said. I also remember that you were beautiful. Memory does play tricks on us. No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake.

We're all tools in somebody's kit. But that doesn't mean we can't make tools out o other people. Or figure our interesting things to use ourselves for.

Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt. They go along because they don't know how to be alone, either physically or intellectually.

Just because your former understanding of the purpose of your life is contradicted doesn't mean that you have to decide there is no purpose.

We don't use the word 'intelligence' with software. We regard that as a naive idea. We say that it's 'complex.' Which means that we don't always understand what it's doing.

Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.

I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

I'm just saying that I...I regret that everybody else has nineteen chances, and only I am limited to a single chance for my genes to continue. Because you believe your genes would confer a great blessing upon the human race. Ram thought about this for a moment, I suppose that's what every adolescent male believes with his whole heart.

That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.