Photo by Nihonjoe

Orson Scott Card is a prolific writer, perhaps best known for Ender’s Game. He is a master wordsmith. Here are some examples:

• Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
• There’s a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be ‘good’, to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
• The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.
• “Music isn’t just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It’s a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it’s joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief.
  Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music?
  How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?”
• “If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.” (from Ender in Exile)
• “The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.” (from Xenocide)
• “Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.” (from Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus)
• “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.” (from Pathfinder)
• “When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.” (from Xenocide)
• “The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.” (from Xenocide)
• “Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Righteous purposes.”
  “So God uses wicked people as his tools?”
  “God gives us the freedom to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses.”
  “So, in the long run, God always wins?”
  “Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.” (from Ender’s Shadow)