Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you’ll get a different answer.
And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.
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.
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.
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
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 only process you’ve mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you’ve mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet.
Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That’s when parents know the least and care the most, so they’re more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they’re right.
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.
Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?
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.
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.
I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It’s the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.
You’re cultural supremacists to the core. You’ll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn’t a chance in the world you’ll notice when they have something to teach you.
Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.
Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.
A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself.
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.