Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.
You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.
You’re a monster.Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?No, just a medal. The budget isn’t inexhaustable.
Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.
This emotion I’m feeling now, this is love, right?””I don’t know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you’re with me?””Yes,” she said.”That’s influenza,” said Miro. “Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.
I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
But it was not the boyish grin she had known when he bounded along the low-gravity inner corridors of Battle School. This smile had weariness in it, and old fears long mastered but still present. It was the smile of wisdom.
With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
It will hurt.” said Petra. “But let’s make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.
Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.
I have hope for you, if only because you’re the only one left to hope for.
I’ll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who’ll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.
I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.
Faith doesn’t mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.
You know how writers are… they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish…Do you think ‘Titanic’ would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.
I think you don’t grow up until you stop worrying about other people’s purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.
When you have faith in something a lot of other people believe then you a member of the church” said Ceas, “When you have faith in something nobody believes, then you a complete wacko
[No single] explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, ALWAYS more to learn.
You frighten me, when you say there isn’t time.””I don’t see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.””But it keeps not ending.””So far, so good.
You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor,” the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.The Speaker’s smile was just as chilly. “And you’re the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn’t talk to me.
And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor
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.
It’s there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees—knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.
If you try and lose then it isn’t your fault. But if you don’t try and we lose, then it’s all your fault.
It’s as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.
I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn’t want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.
There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you.
No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.
Ethan Wyeth: I hope you’re thirsty.”Gideon Wyeth:”Why?”Ethan: “Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.
Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. “People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That’s nothing. We name them.
By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science….
Anything can become a children’s book if you give it to a child…Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
You’re like, both like, Alexander the Great.’We can’t both be Alexander.’Well sometimes I think you’re two side of the same coin, and I’m the metal in between.
Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.
Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.
So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.
I don’t care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won’t get you out of this school.
Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
As god is my witness, it was never my intent to throw out the constitution. I thought it was hanging by a thread, and I could save it… You don’t save it by cutting that thread. – President Nielson
It’s called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.
There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.
Order and disorder’, said the speaker, ‘they each have their beauty.
In fact she’s a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder.
You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you’ll accomplish, and nothing more.
I would follow such beauty, said something inside Ender. I would see as those eyes see.
…What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.
We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
History’s got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can’t be untied.
He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.
Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.
Human: That’s stupid. Isn’t there grass on both sides?
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.
I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.
The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn’t you.
Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.
They have influence, but no power.” “In my experience, influence is power.
When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.
That’s what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There’s meanness and heartlessness and… I don’t even know which of them is me.” – Hyrum Graff
Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.
While you’re governing the colony and I’m writing political philosophy, They’ll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other’s room and play checkers and have pillow fights.
I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.
But shouldn’t they still act like children? They aren’t normal. They act like–history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.
We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.
There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.
As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday.
A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization… One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.
the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and one will ever save you.
As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.
The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.
Everyone was always in such a rush to shoot forward that they never took the time to look back. Which was a mistake. If you wanted to avoid snags, kinks, knots, and cuts, you had to “keep your mind on your line,” as the saying went.
You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake.
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.
If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.
The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.
I’ve learned all I’m ever going to learn from you.
You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.
The only teacher that’s worth anything to you is your enemy.
My master wishes to see you,” said the mounted man.”When the planting’s done,” I said.”Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.””Then he should rejoice, for he’ll learn something new today.” I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left.
we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they’re workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we’re on the right track.
Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.
I believe what Jesus said was, ‘I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive. But of you it is required that you forgive all men.
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner’s loss.
He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying among friends.
That’s the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends.
O my son Absalom,’ Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. ‘my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!
I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.
If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.
You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not.
But most of those to whom Ender’s Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.
who would expect less?” she said. ” You’re a Wiggin.” ” Whatever that means.” He said. ” It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.
In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.’What is it then?’It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.
We don’t punish the ones who fail. They just-don’t go on,
Your motivation has to be rock solid. You have to want it so bad that even th threat of death won’t take it from you.
Come in, Bean.” Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.
Another oral exam, huh?’ Peter said.’Shut up, Peter,’ said Valentine.’You should relax and enjoy it,’ said Peter. ‘It could be worse.”I don’t know how.”It could be an anal exam.
Colonel Graff: We won! That’s all that matters.Ender Wiggin: No. The way we win matters.
What we’ve done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.
Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.
I will never hurt you.I will always help you.If you are hungryIll give you my food.If you are frightenedI am your friend.I love you now.And love does not end.
(Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, “A man who speaks but one language understands none.
I didn’t want to hurt him!” Ender cried. “Why didn’t he just leave me alone!
Carn Carby left, and ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.
For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.
That’s why he hates you, because you didn’t suffer when he tried to punish you.
Being here alone with nothing to do, I’ve been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him…
Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.
I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton
Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn’t understand that. They’d think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That’s because they were stupid.
Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.
Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
Government is all show when it isn’t murder in the dark … or soldiers in the open.
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?
Oh, people get used to so many things,” said Vadesh, “if only they give them selves a chance.
Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill,” said John [Adams]. “Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.
I didn’t know how you’d get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.
I thought speakers didn’t believe in sin,” said a sullen boy.Andrew smiled. “You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.
Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.
Home was merely a dull ache in the back of his memory. A tiredness in his eyes.
The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.
If you asked me to marry you all over again today I’d say yes, said Valentine.And if I had only met you for the first time today, I’d ask.
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.
I came because I’ve spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it’s too late, before we’re not children anymore.
In Russia you learn patience,” said Ivan. “In America you learn action.
Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.
America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.
When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let’s make damn sure we’re the ones alive at the end.
The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.
It was the waiting and watching that cost the most. For during that time he had to endure.
Remember, I’m the only person her who’s paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I’ll break your face. OK?
These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.
If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.
But my eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin.
I taught you everything you know. But I didn’t teach you everything I know.
For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.
If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.
I’ll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I’ll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you’ve forgiven me.
Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.
They’re so brave,” she said. “They’re all dead.” “Only a coward would think of that,” she said scornfully.
Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy? Was there really any difference?
Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it.Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed.
What else should you be? Human beings didn’t evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing’s the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we’d be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.
Just because they didn’t know they were killing human beings doesn’t mean they weren’t killing human beings.
All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.
[T]hat’s the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back.
So the I.F. is spying on Earth.””Just as a mother spies on her children at play in the yard.””Good to know you’re looking out for us, Mummy.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?
You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research.
It’s a stupid leader who can’t turn follower when somebody offers him a wiser course
She likes us,” said Umbo. “I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.” “Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.” “They were delicious.
Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.
A good commander, thought Ender, doesn’t have to make stupid threats.
He wasn’t telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness.
It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
Never believe a rumor of my death,’ said Peter. ‘I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition.
Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I.
Guils is the greatest weapon vecause its cuts rarely heal and it aims for the heart
We need you to help us figure out how you can help us.
I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it’s due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don’t have to do it often.
The devil?” Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. “Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was.” Jason smiled. “But he meant well.
So the whole war is beause we can’t talk to each other.
Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him
As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, ” I don’t care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won’t get you out of this school.
Don’t make fun of me!” Ender said. “I’m afraid I’m going crazy.
I’ll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I’ll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.
It had to be a trick or you couldn’t have done it.
You don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.
In my dreams,” said Ender, “I’m never sure whether I’m really me.
I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.
And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?
I’m not stupid!” In Bean’s experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.
The have influence, but no power.””In my experience, influence is power.
I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.
So I don’t even get a chance to learn before I’m being judged.
There are miracles even reactivity can’t pull off, Ender
Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they’ve been given.
He committed the crime of stupidity while under my command,” said Citizen.”Oh my,” said Rigg. “They’re handing out the death penalty for that these days?
Maybe that’s all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we’re doing.
The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.
Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.
To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.
My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants.
A minor request,” said Mazer. “Let’s not refer to it as the training cage. ‘Training’ sounds laborious and regimented. Soldiers groan at the word. These men joined the IF to fight, sir. Let’s call it the Battle Room.
If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly – I’ll beat you unfairly first.
Ender didn’t like fighting. He didn’t like Peter’s kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn’t like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
I didn’t want to kill them all. I didn’t want to kill anybody! I’m not a killer! You didn’t want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.
Never take another human being to the third life, because we don’t know how to go.
We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
I can see by your face that I’ll never persuade you. And that’s surprising, because usually you at least try to see my side.”I can see your side,” said Cecily. “I’ve got a much clearer view of it than you do, from over here on my side.
Eko brushed a tear from her eye, and Immo jeered at her, but father held up a hand. “Never mock a tender heart,” he said.
With “gay marriage,” the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.
I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.
Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.
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.
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.