Life & Wisdom Quote by Orson Scott Card

Card’s line flatters metaphor with an engineer’s respect for compression: the idea that language can behave like a good algorithm, doing more with less. It’s a writer’s credo disguised as a neat aphorism. “Truth” here isn’t fact-checkable data; it’s the felt accuracy of an experience rendered suddenly graspable. Metaphor doesn’t win by being literal. It wins by being fast.

The specific intent is partly defensive and partly evangelistic. Science fiction and fantasy writers, Card included, routinely get told their work is “just” allegory, “just” escapism, “not real.” This is a rebuttal: figurative language isn’t ornamental, it’s a delivery system for meaning that literal exposition often can’t carry. When you say grief is an ocean or power is gravity, you skip the procedural description and land directly on the sensation. The “least space” is doing double duty: it’s about page economy, but also about cognitive space, the limited bandwidth of attention. Metaphor is a hack for the human brain.

The subtext is a quiet challenge to a culture that mistakes bluntness for honesty. Literalism can be a way of hiding, too: piling up specifics to avoid the harder job of interpretation. Metaphor forces a reader to collaborate, to complete the circuit. That collaboration is where the “most truth” lives.

Context matters because Card’s fiction is obsessed with communication under pressure: translating alien minds, moral dilemmas reduced to tactical choices, children asked to bear adult stakes. Metaphor, in that world, isn’t decoration. It’s survival technology.