The Shadow Quintet Quotes

“You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“And no matter how well we think we know people, the fact is we’re all strangers in the end.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“It was a language he had learned too late for it to come naturally to him. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent. The”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“That’s why I don’t want him to take our babies away from me. I must have them all, the way conquerors have had to have this city. I must have them. That is my empire.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“This wasn’t about killing Bean—that was just a bonus. It was about getting Bean’s babies.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“Call them stories. When things happen, we invent stories about them. About why they happened. That’s all science is, and history—stories about why things happen or happened. They are never, never true—never complete and always at least a little bit wrong, and we know it. But they’re true enough to be useful. I doubt our minds could even grasp the whole truth about anything—the nets of causality spread too wide to be held within a single mind. But the stories, the useful lies—we share those and pass them on and when we learn more we improve on them, or when we need different stories for new circumstances, we change them and pretend we always told them that way.” Ender”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“Children never do understand their own childishness. Then”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“And because it was possible, there was a part of him that wanted to play it out, see where this path led. I”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It’s like war—does any war ever settle anything? But we can’t judge that way. The test of a war isn’t whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it? And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“it’s not unusual in history for the solution to one problem to become the root of the next one.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“War gets invented every time there’s somebody so hungry for domination that he can’t leave peaceful nations alone.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“A man who embraces the voice of evil when it whispers in his ear is no less evil than the whisperer.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“Ambition leads you to great risk. But ambition never leads you to certain destruction.” “Unless you’re a fool.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“They offered something that was genuinely good, and people’s lives were better because they offered it. It was not a noble cause that would get written up in the histories. But it was not nothing, either. A person could do worse than spend some large percentage of his life in a cause like that. Bean”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“Truth did not care much about such credentials. It refused to give up and reveal itself just because it realized you were bound to find it eventually. Bean”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“humans will always act to preserve their own lives—except for the times when they don’t.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. They”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight

“the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. I”
― Orson Scott Card, The Shadow Quintet: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, and Shadows in Flight