No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing.
There’s no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don’t, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn’t like it just doesn’t hang out with them.
Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down.
It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.
The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.
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.