Quotes from Orson Scott Card

What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.

don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there, and you've seen nothing but the map.

And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them.

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

It was funny. The adults taking all this so seriously, and the children playing along, playing along, believing it too until suddenly the adults went too far, tried too hard, and the children could see through their game.

What could go wrong... Doing some stupid impulsive thing that caused the death of drowthers was practically a family tradition.

He knew he could always be smart later, if that turned out to be a better strategy. But once you admitted to being smart, there was no going back.

My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants.

It is not the rituals of worship that please the gods.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given [to] you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

Never mock a tender heart.

We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.

If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you.

Here are our failures, and here is our greatness; we did not mean to hurt you, and we forgive you for our death.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover.

We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams. How were we to know? We could live with you in peace. Believe us, believe us, believe us.

There are so many powerful people in this world who refuse to see any vision they didn't think of.

Nobody has control of anything. We're all beggars at the throne of fate. But sometimes he has mercy!

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.

You treated me the way you like to be treated when you grieve, and now I'm treating you the way I like to be treated. We prescribe our own medicine for each other.

And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor

Anything that is possible to be believed is an image of truth.

I didn't know that empty rationalization was part of your programming, said Ram. We would not be fit companions for human beings without it.