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.
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.
Working is hard and distracts from having fun.
Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I’m gone. There’s no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive.
Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.
As long as you keep getting born, it’s alright to die some times.
I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right.
The Lord took twice the time making thee, Alvin Smith, cause it took that long to put the mischief in.
Let’s fly away and live forever.
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.
Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.
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.
I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.
There is a myth that homosexuals are ‘born that way,’ and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.
You will learn to defeat the enemy.
You want to make me the best soldier possible. Go down and look at the standings. Look at the all-time standings. So far you’re doing an excellent job with me. Congratulations. Now when are you going to put me up against a good army?
It’s the teachers, they’re the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other.
The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.
The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.
Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.