Orson Scott Card

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.

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.

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.

What am I now, Alai?" "Still good." "At what?" "At--anything. There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe." "I don't want to go to the end of the universe." "So where do you want to go? They'll follow you." I want to go home, thought Ender, but I don't know where it is.

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

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

You understand that the piggies are animals, and you no more condemn them for murdering Libo and Pipo than you condemn a cabra for shewing up capim." That's right," said Miro. Ender smiled. "And that's why you'll never learn anything from them. Because you think of them as animals.

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

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

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.

Ah, I am the judge of dreams, and you are the judge of love. Well, I find you guilty of dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams. I only hope that someday you won't declare me innocent of the crime of loving you.

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.

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

Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice." I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.

It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.

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.

Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.

It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?

The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.