Quotes from Orson Scott Card

You don't understand," he said. "Yes I do." "No you don't. I don't want to beat Peter." "Then what do you want?" "I want him to love me." She had no answer. As far as she knew, Peter didn't love anybody. Ender said nothing more. Just lay there.

Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.

If you try to look up my skirt, I'll poke needles in your eyes right through your eyelids while you're asleep.' 'I'm looking for help, you give me nightmares, thank you so much.' She was on the top step now, reaching up for a bin marked DRY BEANS. Rigg looked up her skirt, mostly because she told him not to, and saw nothing at all of interest. He could never understand why Nox and other women, too, were always so sure men wanted to see whatever it is they concealed under their clothes.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what just living might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally.

Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt.

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone." - Valentine Wiggin

you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man. Qing-jao

Everybody needs rescuing. Lonely people need rescuing, anyway. There's nothing but lonely people in this world. Even people who think they're not lonely, they're aching with loneliness or the fear of being lonely. So we saved each other every day for the past couple of months.

I would follow such beauty, said something inside Ender. I would see as those eyes see.

Only because of ignorance could he shape the world so fearlessly

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves

Like Santa Claus. You adults pretend he doesn't exist, but we know that he really does.

You don't have to eat the entire turd to know that it's not a crab cake.

need for a "speaker for the dead" and for the living.

Going to say it anyway, said Graff. Poor fool of a boy. Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?

There is nothing that doesn't decay. Some things decay more slowly than others, that's all.

I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously.

If there's a problem, you fix it. You don't set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it.

Heck, everything we decide will be wrong, said Step, because no matter what we do, something bad will happen later. So I refuse to regret any of it.

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

Ender laughed and shook his head. 'You're actually having fun, Val' 'I can't think why I shouldn't.

The difference between science fiction and fantasy…is simply this, science fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.