Quotes from Orson Scott Card

This is the Speaker for the Dead? Judging someone by appearances?" "Maybe I've fallen in love with Grego." "You've always been a sucker for people who pee on you.

Love is random; fear is inevitable.

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.

I didn't want to see you." "They told me." "I was afraid that I'd still love you." "I hoped that you would.

Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?

People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue - this is what will endear him to the locals.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

The ways of love are strange and hard: The love you want is always barred; The love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.

Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

The only way to learn is by changing your mind.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down.

There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.

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

Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women.

The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.

She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.

He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.

I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.

Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you

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

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.