Life & Wisdom Quote by Orson Scott Card

Work, in Card's framing, is a temporary exile. The line lands because it treats a day job not as self-actualization but as a controlled departure from the "human universe" - a phrase that slyly suggests community as an ecosystem you can fall out of when you spend hours inside your own head. For a working writer, that tracks: the labor is solitary, obsessive, often conducted in a room where the only other voices are invented ones. Calling the return "the best thing" flips the usual creative-myth script. Instead of romanticizing the trance state, he admits the relief of being done with it.

The subtext is a quiet warning about the cost of making things. Writing demands a kind of strategic inhumanity: you instrumentalize people into characters, turn emotion into material, convert lived time into usable scenes. The phrase "rejoining" implies he hasn't been fully present while working - not morally absent, but socially and sensorially thinned out. It's also a modest pushback against the prestige of overwork. The day ends, the self comes back online.

Context matters: Card's career sits in the late-20th-century professionalization of genre fiction, where output, deadlines, and a home-office grind replace the bohemian pose. The sentence reads like craft-world candor, not tortured-genius theater. It works because it punctures the fantasy that the page is "real life" and insists, almost tenderly, that the actual miracle is dinner, conversation, and ordinary belonging.