History’s got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can’t be untied.
We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.
See how ignorant you are? You don’t even know why you need to know the things you don’t know yet.
I cut the wood however I like, but it’s the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn’t just your memory that makes you who you are. There’s something in the grain of the mind.
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.
Anything that is possible to be believed is an image of truth.
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.
The stone loves you. Don’t you see it? Hasn’t it shown you its love all your life?
It was an unbroken network of causality leading back to the first human who wasn’t a chimp. And farther back, to the coalescing of the planets around the sun. If you wish to call that God, go ahead.
I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.
You underestimate yourself.
And it’s true, thought Valentine. I’m not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.
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. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
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 but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?
Stories are invented as you go along...
Keep this in mind – it only works because what’s between you, that’s real, that’s what matters. Billions of those connections between human beings. That’s what you’re fighting to keep alive.
They prayed for it, they want it, but when they got it, they complained.
I didn’t know how you’d get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.
It had to be a trick or you couldn’t have done it.