1,174 Quotes by Orson Scott Card

The boy whose arm he had broken was out for vengeance. His name, Ender quickly learned, was Bernard. He spoke his own name with a French accent, since the French, with their arrogant Separatism, insisted that the teaching of Standard not begin until the age of four, when the French language patterns were already set. His accent made him exotic and interesting; his broken arm made him a martyr; his sadism made him a natural focus for all those who loved pain in others.

He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost.

Science isn’t done by consensus. It’s done by rigorous testing.

I think you don’t grow up until you stop worrying about other people’s purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

Just because your former understanding of the purpose of your life is contradicted doesn’t mean that you have to decide there is no purpose.

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.

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.

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

Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender’s Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel’s very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story’s vision of the world is so relentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.