The snake began to unweave itself from the rug again, only this time Ender did not hesitate. He stepped on the head of the snake and crushed it under his foot. It writhed and twisted under him, and in response he twisted and ground it deeper into the stone floor. Finally it was still. Ender picked it up and shook it, until it unwove itself and the pattern in the rug was gone. Then, still dragging the snake behind him, he began to look for a way out.
It’s a stupid leader who can’t turn follower when somebody offers him a wiser course.
Why do I feel a song coming on?” said Bean. The sarcastic words slipped out of him unbidden.
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.
People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world.
Inside us there is a place that is our true self.
Think like a machine instead of a boy.
He was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.
Knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.
No system works well unless good people do their jobs with integrity, and then almost any system works well enough.
We have special voices for different people; our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with.
Once you get a storm started, it’s mighty hard to slow it back down again.
Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that’s the way of the world, the best way.
Good-bye, Eros, and all the soldiers on it, the ones who fought for me and the other children, the ones who manipulated us and lied to us for the good of humanity, the ones who conspired to defame me and keep me from returning to Earth, all of you, good and bad, kind and selfish, good-bye to you, I am no longer one of you, neither your pawn nor your savior.
Focus too closely on the goal you haven’t accomplished, and you’ll fail to notice the victories you achieve along the way.
Darlin’, said Leslie, ’everybody on earth stays alive day to day solely because everyone they meet decides, every single day, not to kill them...
How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?
She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.
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.
He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.