Quotes from Orson Scott Card

Everyone thinks they do, until they take a child into their heart. Only then do you know what it is to be a hostage to love. To have someone else's life matter more than your own.

H]is 'philosophy' seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either.

Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.

There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you.

And all I managed, barely, was endurance.

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.

Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her; it was so different that it was not even the same event.

Verily joined in. "My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.

I'll carry you,' said Ender, 'I'll go from world to world until I find a time and a place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time they can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.

Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!

Still, she said nothing, because his words came from God, and hers from grief. To him, it was as if what the Lord had promised were already fulfilled; he thought of himself as a man with many children, and it didn't occur to him that she did not live in that world.

You really are the stupidest smart kid in the world," said Mother.

Truth did not care much about such credentials. It refused to give up and reveal itself just because it realized you were bound to find it eventually. Bean

Authority was a little plastic ball that Graff carried.

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.

It's all part of their system of totems. We've always tried to play along with it, and act as if we believed it.' 'How condescending of you,' said Ender. 'It's standard anthropological practice,' said Miro. 'You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.

Sima nodded. "To lose a soldier is a type of death. A lesser death than the one that will take us all, but a death nonetheless. If we did not feel so, I suppose we would be unfit for command." He turned and faced them. "I have lost upwards of ten thousand since this war began. All of them sons and daughters to me. If we do not stop this gas, this weapon of the enemy, I will lose them all. See to it that I don't.

when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization.

He understood all the words, he just had no clue what was going on. The Aunts said what they meant. Or at least they meant what they said.

I speak to everyone in the language they understand," said Ender. "That isn't being slick. It's being clear.

If our happiness is the purpose of God," said Alai, "why are so few of us happy?

We suddenly find ourselves afflicted with peace, you see. Always a disaster for those whose careers have not reached their natural apex.

Thus a man hates the house they lived in together, because either he does not change it, so that it is as dead as his wife, or because he does change it, so that it is no longer half of their making.

And so she wrote, and wept; and when the weeping was done, the writing went on. When the hair that he had left behind was sealed in a small box and buried in the grass near Human's root, she would stand and speak. Her voice would raise him from the dead, make him live again in memory. And she would also be merciful; and she would also be just. That much, at least, she had learned from him.