Orson scott card quotes

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

It is a common trait of primates to become submissive and even worshipful toward one who has the power to kill them.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

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

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.

None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.

Surely you're not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It's there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees - knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.

Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet.

America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.

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

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

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

To have a choice at all is to be free - even when the choice is between two terrible things.

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending-the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.

Sometimes you have to trust people enough to let them succeed and love them enough to let them fail.

That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.

That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

Into the the air, into the earth, into the fire, I am with you.

He's not a killer. He just wins... Thoroughly

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: 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, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

When I am drunk I am at my best. It is the national knack of the French.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." -Taleswapper

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him.

It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.

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

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone.

Faith doesn't mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.

She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell. Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it. And it's delicious.

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.

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.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?

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

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.

And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.

I taught you everything you know. But I didn't teach you everything I know.

Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?

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

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong — for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

Madness, and then illumination.

And yet.. even if you had been right, it would only have been by accident. A broken clock is right two times a day.

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.

A character is what he does, yes - but even more, a character is what he means to do.

I'm never impossible. The most I ever allow myself is to be somewhat unlikely.

But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. 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.

What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he's done, and that's as good as any man ever gets.

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 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.

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

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.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

We have to go. I'm almost happy here.

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.

Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.

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

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.

You have to measure your success by the way your audience responds to your games. No matter how small that audience is, it's yours. Your game is part of the lives and the memories of those people in a way that WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Windows can never be.

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down…A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.

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.

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you.

It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.

...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.

Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

Do the gods of different nations talk to each other?...Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other's worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: "Are there any who can honestly boast, My worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives?

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

Just because you believe it doesn't make it so.

Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor . . . I fought to win.

Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

It has been my experience that the better a man you are, the more folks there are who resent you for it, and find occasion to get angry at you no matter how kindly meant your deeds may be.

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.

Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.

I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.

You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven't died yet.

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.

I buy way too many books.

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

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

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

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

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.

It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.

You frighten me, when you say there isn't time." "I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia." "But it keeps not ending." "So far, so good.

I will never hurt you. I will always help you. If you are hungry Ill give you my food. If you are frightened I am your friend. I love you now. And love does not end.

The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.

If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.

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

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when the media are almost a monoculture.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

it was all your genes that made us geniuses, mom. said peter. we sure didn't get any from dad. i heard that. father said, not looking up from the news that was being displayed on the table while he ate it would've been wasted if you hadn't

Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

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.

Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.

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.