Orson Scott Card Quotes

“You,” said Purity, “have been long enough out of England to pick up some American brag.”
“But surrounded by Americans as I am,” said Cooper, “my brag is like a farthing in a sack of guineas.”

"I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them."
"A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed."

He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death.

We are all fools when one wise man appears.

You are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too.

Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.

But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.

“This is Alvin Smith,” said Cooper. “He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.”

“Did they program brattiness into you?”
“That’s a trait I developed for myself,” she said. “Do you like it?”

You really are children. You have no idea how power works, or who has it, or what you can actually do with it.

What is this thing between women, like men are a joke that women all told each other long ago but men never get it.

She grunted. “Nothing unusual?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, if you ask me, that’s pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.”

A duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.