Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Until you know that you’re tougher than the enemy, you maneuver, you don’t commit to battle.”

— Orson Scott Card

452. “You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

455. “The snake began to unweave itself from the rug again, only this time Ender did not hesitate. He stepped on the head of the snake and crushed it under his foot. It writhed and twisted under him, and in response he twisted and ground it deeper into the stone floor. Finally it was still. Ender picked it up and shook it, until it unwove itself and the pattern in the rug was gone. Then, still dragging the snake behind him, he began to look for a way out.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

457. “Besides,” said Rigg-the-killer, “I don’t want to leave the future of the human race on both planets in the tiny little hands of the sentient mice of Odinfold.”

— Orson Scott Card

458. “No, the hurts of the mind were too strange, too invisible, too magical to hope for the same kind of tolerance and help from even the best of people. It frightens me, thought DeAnne. Why should I expect others to be better than I am?”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

461. “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

462. “I am a creature of chemicals.”

— Orson Scott Card

463. “Well, how do I know that they don’t know the answer unless I ask?”

— Orson Scott Card

464. “As the proverb said, “Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.” Too late for thinking now. Too early for eating.”

— Orson Scott Card

465. “It’s called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.”

— Orson Scott Card

466. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

469. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Orson Scott Card

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

484. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

492. “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

493. “What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.”

— Orson Scott Card

494. “The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”

— Orson Scott Card

495. “Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it’s going.”

— Orson Scott Card

496. “You own nothing?”

— Orson Scott Card

497. “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

498. “Don’t press her,” said Cooper. “If someone decides to leave something unsaid, my experience is that everyone is happier if they don’t insist on his saying it.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

500. “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