Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “That is the Earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of the hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upward from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets and winds and birds. And the voice of one girl, who spoke to him out of his far-off childhood.”

— Orson Scott Card

252. “We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”

— Orson Scott Card

253. “Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I’m old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.”

— Orson Scott Card

254. “Love is random; fear is inevitable.”

— Orson Scott Card

255. “My hands are clean, but not because I wasn’t prepared to bloody them.”

— Orson Scott Card

256. “The only teacher that’s worth anything to you is your enemy.”

— Orson Scott Card

257. “A character is what he does, yes – but even more, a character is what he means to do.”

— Orson Scott Card

258. “I listen to music constantly while writing.”

— Orson Scott Card

259. “Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological execration I could think of.”

— Orson Scott Card

260. “But my eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin.”

— Orson Scott Card

261. “The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don’t, there’s no hope for you.”

— Orson Scott Card

262. “We do have a right to defend ourselves as best we can, and the only way we found that works is killing the buggers before they kill us.”

— Orson Scott Card

263. “Then the raft rocked, and she turned to see Ender calmly crushing the life out of the wasp with one finger. “These are a nasty breed,” Ender said. “They sting you without waiting to be insulted first.”

— Orson Scott Card

264. “How short life is for fools.”

— Orson Scott Card

265. “Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.”

— Orson Scott Card

266. “History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken.”

— Orson Scott Card

267. “I’ll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I’ll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.”

— Orson Scott Card

268. “He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.”

— Orson Scott Card

269. “Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it. Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed.”

— Orson Scott Card

270. “Once you understand what people really want, you can’t hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can’t hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”

— Orson Scott Card

271. “He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we have forgotten him.”

— Orson Scott Card

272. “The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn’t think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn’t the same as murder, it was a fair fight.”

— Orson Scott Card

273. “You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.”

— Orson Scott Card

274. “Only a fool closes the door when the wolf is already inside the barn.”

— Orson Scott Card

275. “There’s no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don’t, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn’t like it just doesn’t hang out with them.”

— Orson Scott Card

276. “That’s just one of the drawbacks when you love somebody so much greater than yourself, Miro told himself. I’ll never know the difference. She’ll come back and I’ll be happy with all the time we have together and I’ll never know how little time and effort she actually devotes to being with me. A diversion, that’s what I am. Then.”

— Orson Scott Card

277. “It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.”

— Orson Scott Card

278. “Fairness is a wonderful attribute, Major Anderson. It has nothing to do with war.”

— Orson Scott Card

279. “Today, Mr. Darcy is a vampire.”

— Orson Scott Card

280. “You just live in the place you’re in, you don’t worry about where you used to be or where you wish you were, here is where you are and here’s where you’ve got to find a way to survive.”

— Orson Scott Card

281. “Take me home, he said silently to Graff. In my dream you said you loved me. Take me home.”

— Orson Scott Card

282. “No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn’t help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do.”

— Orson Scott Card

283. “Darkness bound them closer than light.”

— Orson Scott Card

284. “With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.”

— Orson Scott Card

285. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

286. “Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.”

— Orson Scott Card

287. “Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one’s family was much worse. Humiliation of one’s social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one’s nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.”

— Orson Scott Card

288. “I’ve had your tears with mine, and you’ve had mine with yours. I think that’s more intimate even than a kiss.”

— Orson Scott Card

289. “Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts – those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.”

— Orson Scott Card

290. “He jumped at the Giants face, clambered up his lip and nose, and began to dig in the Giant’s eye.”

— Orson Scott Card

291. “But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.”

— Orson Scott Card

292. “Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.”

— Orson Scott Card

293. “A duel is just two murders who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.”

— Orson Scott Card

294. “If a pig goes upon the threshing-floor, or a field, or a garden, and the owner of the meadow, or the field, or the garden smites it so that it die, he shall give it back to its owner; but if he does not give it back, he becomes a thief.”

— Orson Scott Card

295. “The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.”

— Orson Scott Card

296. “Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don’t put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.”

— Orson Scott Card

297. “Knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.”

— Orson Scott Card

298. “In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

300. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.”

— Orson Scott Card