Orson Scott Card Quotes

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you're really strangers.

Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

In love, as in life, one misheard word can be tremendously important. If you tell someone you love them, for instance, you must be absolutely certain that they have replied "I love you back" and not "I love your back" before you continue the conversation.

You ever have that feeling? Like you’ve known someone your whole life but you don’t know them at all.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

Love will enter cloaked in friendship's name.

Love is durable. It's like Teflon. ...Trust is like fine china. Secrets destroy trust.

You knew that she wanted me to marry somebody else,and you never told me?" He appeared confused by my reaction. "It wasn't my place." "Maybe it wasn't your place as a tracker, but as the guy making out with me in this bed, yeah,I think it was your place to tell me that I'm supposed to marry someone else.

It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.

By deceiving one another through false assumptions and misrepresentations there has been, in reality, a great lapse and delay in achieving the real goals.

Liz, I like you very much," he says. "Oh," she says, "I like you very much, too!" Owen is not sure if she means "O" for Owen, or just plan "Oh." He is not sure what difference it would make in either case. He feels the needs to clarify. "When I said 'I like you very much,' I actually meant 'I love you.'" "O," she says, "I actually meant the same thing." She closes the car door behind her. "Well," he says to himself, driving back to his apartment, "isn't that something?

We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

Lying, cheating, hiding is the exact opposite of the behavior of a man who's really into you.

Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me.

Myron reached for the phone and dialed Win's number. After the eighth ring he began to hang up when a weak, distant voice coughed. "Hello?" Win?" Yeah." You okay?" Hello?" Win?" Yeah." What took you so long to answer the phone?" Hello?" Win?" Who is this?" Myron." Myron Bolitar?" How many other Myrons do you know?" Myron Bolitar?" No, Myron Rockefeller." Something's wrong," Win said. What?" Terribly wrong." What are you talking about?" Some asshole is calling me at seven in the morning pretending to be my best friend." Sorry, I forgot the time.