Orson Scott Card Quotes

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

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

Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.

I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.

We have to go. I’m almost happy here.

I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher.

Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?

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.

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

So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you’re good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

He could see Bonzo’s anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.

I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it’s due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don’t have to do it often.

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.

If you try and lose then it isn’t your fault. But if you don’t try and we lose, then it’s all your fault.

I don’t care if I pass your test, I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly - I’ll beat you unfairly first.

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.

And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

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

I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.

Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore.

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.

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.”

“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.”

“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to…a person who really believes she doesn’t belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I’m not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.”

“Speaker, I know you’re thinking that we’re afraid of the piggies. And perhaps some of us are. But the feeling most of us have, most of the time, isn’t fear at all. It’s hatred. Loathing.”

“She saw her future ahead of her, bleak and unbearable and unavoidable. She dared not die, and yet she would hardly be alive, unable to marry, unable even to think about the subject herself, lest she discover the deadly secret and inadvertently let it slip; alone forever, burdened forever, guilty forever, yearning for death but forbidden to reach for it.”