Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.”

— Orson Scott Card

402. “As for Peter – we didn’t even suggest a meeting, and so he didn’t have a chance to tell us to go to hell.”

— Orson Scott Card

403. “These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.”

— Orson Scott Card

404. “He was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.”

— Orson Scott Card

405. “You underestimate yourself.”

— Orson Scott Card

406. “When both parties are lying and they both know the other party’s lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.”

— Orson Scott Card

407. “The Lord took twice the time making thee, Alvin Smith, cause it took that long to put the mischief in.”

— Orson Scott Card

408. “Working is hard and distracts from having fun.”

— Orson Scott Card

409. “But I’m three times your age or more and my brain is worn out and full up. I don’t have much room to tuck new things square inside; they just cling to the outside for a while and drop off.”

— Orson Scott Card

410. “Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...”

— Orson Scott Card

411. “I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.”

— Orson Scott Card

412. “That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. “The most noble title any child can have,” Demosthenes wrote, “is Third.”

— Orson Scott Card

413. “When you really know someone, you can’t hate him.”

— Orson Scott Card

414. “It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it.”

— Orson Scott Card

415. “Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him.”

— Orson Scott Card

416. “I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn’t just survive, but deserves to.”

— Orson Scott Card

417. “It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit.”

— Orson Scott Card

418. “I always think of books as being like people. Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don’t have to seek them out and spend time with them.”

— Orson Scott Card

419. “Names come and go. They get attached to you, and then you lose them, and they get attached to someone else.”

— Orson Scott Card

420. “He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying among friends.”

— Orson Scott Card

421. “This emotion I’m feeling now, this is love, right?”

— Orson Scott Card

422. “See how ignorant you are? You don’t even know why you need to know the things you don’t know yet.”

— Orson Scott Card

423. “I didn’t know how you’d get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.”

— Orson Scott Card

424. “Maybe we’re the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.”

— Orson Scott Card

425. “Maybe it isn’t based on what you deserve. Maybe it’s based on what you need.”

— Orson Scott Card

426. “He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.”

— Orson Scott Card

427. “Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.”

— Orson Scott Card

428. “Then he was done. He pulled away, rolled onto his back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re welcome,” she said. She believed in answering what people meant, not what they said.”

— Orson Scott Card

429. “You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not.”

— Orson Scott Card

430. “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

431. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

436. “There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.”

— Orson Scott Card

437. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

439. “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

440. “It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.”

— Orson Scott Card

441. “He couldn’t go into his army’s barracks – he had long since learned that the best commanders stay away unless they have some reason to visit. The boys have to have a chance to be at peace, at rest, without someone listening, to favor or despise them depending on the way they talk, and act, and think.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

444. “We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.”

— Orson Scott Card

445. “We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.”

— Orson Scott Card

446. “Unless he’s really clever,” said Theresa. “Smarter than us?” said Peter. He and John Paul looked at each other. Then both of them shook their heads, said, “Naw,” and then burst out laughing.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

448. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

450. “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