Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “We’re going to make him the best military commander in history. And then put the fate of the world on his shoulders.”

— Orson Scott Card

452. “All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”

— Orson Scott Card

453. “I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right.”

— Orson Scott Card

454. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

455. “The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.”

— Orson Scott Card

456. “How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out.”

— Orson Scott Card

457. “If you had any brains, you’d be in a real career, like selling life insurance.”

— Orson Scott Card

458. “The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.”

— Orson Scott Card

459. “They aren’t having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once.”

— Orson Scott Card

460. “Inside us there is a place that is our true self.”

— Orson Scott Card

461. “Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association.”

— Orson Scott Card

462. “Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.”

— Orson Scott Card

463. “Until you know that you’re tougher than the enemy, you maneuver, you don’t commit to battle.”

— Orson Scott Card

464. “When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.”

— Orson Scott Card

465. “Maybe she couldn’t know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.”

— Orson Scott Card

466. “I am a creature of chemicals.”

— Orson Scott Card

467. “Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.”

— Orson Scott Card

468. “I know, you’ve been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they’re not. WE’RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won’t let us have anything new, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren’t in armies, they aren’t COMMANDERS, they don’t rule over forty other kids, it’s more than anybody can take and not get crazy.”

— Orson Scott Card

469. “As for me,” said Alvin, “I’m neutral on lying, seeing as how there’s times when the truth just hurts people.” “I’m none too fanatic about telling the truth, myself,” said the woman. “For instance, I believe every girl ought to grow up in the firm belief that she’s clever and pretty, and every boy that he’s strong and good-hearted. In my experience, what starts out as a fib turns into a hope and if you keep it up long enough, it starts to be mostly true.”

— Orson Scott Card

470. “What an unfriendly country,” said Noxon. “Different time, different place,” said Wheaton. “We think we’re a very welcoming country. Generous and kind. Unless we don’t like your language or the way you look.”

— Orson Scott Card

471. “Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they’d say on television later.”

— Orson Scott Card

472. “The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.”

— Orson Scott Card

473. “The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals.”

— Orson Scott Card

474. “Human: That’s stupid. Isn’t there grass on both sides?”

— Orson Scott Card

475. “We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.”

— Orson Scott Card

476. “I’ve learned all I’m ever going to learn from you.”

— Orson Scott Card

477. “Time to repay old humiliations, is that it, Bean? ‘Of course,’ Ender said contemptuously. ‘I’m not as close to the floor as you are.”

— Orson Scott Card

478. “That’s what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There’s meanness and heartlessness and... I don’t even know which of them is me.” – Hyrum Graff.”

— Orson Scott Card

479. “Buut how to fight with singers, how to win a gift that could only be given freely- those were questions whose answers could not be found.”

— Orson Scott Card

480. “But always a giant, long before his body showed it.”

— Orson Scott Card

481. “A minor request,” said Mazer. “Let’s not refer to it as the training cage. ‘Training’ sounds laborious and regimented. Soldiers groan at the word. These men joined the IF to fight, sir. Let’s call it the Battle Room.”

— Orson Scott Card

482. “The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.”

— Orson Scott Card

483. “He kissed her and killed her then dumped her body in the river.”

— Orson Scott Card

484. “Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.”

— Orson Scott Card

485. “In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.”

— Orson Scott Card

486. “People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world.”

— Orson Scott Card

487. “He had lots of deaths, but that was OK, games were like that, you died a lot until you got the hang of it.”

— Orson Scott Card

488. “If it isn’t a wonderful story first, who cares how “important” it is?”

— Orson Scott Card

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

489. “If you read to your kids you’ll make readers out of them, partly because they’ll associate reading with good parent time.”

— Orson Scott Card

Featured in: Reading Quotes

490. “It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.”

— Orson Scott Card

491. “I’m just saying things never get so bad we can’t do something to make them better.”

— Orson Scott Card

492. “My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer.”

— Orson Scott Card

493. “Famous at high school is like being employee of the month at the sanitation department.”

— Orson Scott Card

494. “It is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.”

— Orson Scott Card

495. “Good-bye, Eros, and all the soldiers on it, the ones who fought for me and the other children, the ones who manipulated us and lied to us for the good of humanity, the ones who conspired to defame me and keep me from returning to Earth, all of you, good and bad, kind and selfish, good-bye to you, I am no longer one of you, neither your pawn nor your savior.”

— Orson Scott Card

496. “I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.”

— Orson Scott Card

497. “I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.”

— Orson Scott Card

498. “Lack of truthfulness doesn’t weaken a story if you can get enough people to believe the lie.”

— Orson Scott Card

499. “If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.”

— Orson Scott Card

500. “I need to find out if I’m as good at peace as I am at war.”

— Orson Scott Card