Quotes from Orson Scott Card

my courage is nothing but borrowed courage." "Not borrowed," said Mother. "Stored up. In us. Like a bank. We've seen your courage and we saved some for you when you temporarily ran out and needed some of it back." "Cash flow problem, that's all it was," said Father.

The future happiness of the human race depends on good people who want to live at peace with their neighbors, and who are willing to protect their neighbors from those who don't want peace.

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." ? , Speaker for the Dead

But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them.

You talk so sweet I bet you have to suck on salt for half and hour to get the taste of sugar out of your mouth.

Darlin', said Leslie, 'everybody on earth stays alive day to day solely because everyone they meet decides, every single day, not to kill them...

How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?

Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Ender's Game is not simply a story of an exceptional child who must outwit aliens in order to save the human race—it is the story of an exceptional child who fears he is a monster and is tricked into doing something monstrous.

If you think that," said Bean, "you're an idiot." "Actually, I do think that, and I'm not an idiot.

She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.

That is the tragedy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.

Isolation is—the optimum environment for creativity. It

It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it.

Maybe we're assigning Achilles supernatural powers," said Petra. "He isn't a god. Not even a hero. Just a sick kid." "No," said Bean. "I'm a sick kid. He's the devil." "Well, so," said Petra, "maybe the devil's a sick kid.

Stories are invented as you go along...

So you're coming along with me, increasing our risk of being identified and allowing Achilles to get his two worst nemeses with one well-placed bomb, in order to save my life?

Power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it.

But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

Then the raft rocked, and she turned to see Ender calmly crushing the life out of the wasp with one finger. These are a nasty breed, Ender said. They sting you without waiting to be insulted first.

There's never enough information...That's the great tragedy of human knowledge. No matter how much we think we know, we can never predict the future.

When Achilles is most useful and loyal to you, that is when he has most certainly betrayed you"?

It might have been a single day; it might have been a week; from his dreams, it could have been months.

To have Achilles's gratitude was clearly a terminal disease.