Explore Quotes by Orson Scott Card

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

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.

I love you Ender. More than ever. No matter what you decide.

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.

In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.

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.

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.

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

Mom," said Peter, "nobody thinks you're a lackwit, if that's what you're worried about." Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor's dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit.

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

If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat. ~Val

Oh, I'll live Ender's life, too. It's so much more interesting than my own." ~Val

One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.

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.

What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

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.

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.

An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.