Everything we do means something.
Illness or adultery, Alvin figured ignorance worked about as well in both cases. Not knowing just meant it was going to get worse.
I sold my brother,” Valentine said, “and they paid me for it.
You don’t understand,” he said. “Yes I do.” “No you don’t. I don’t want to beat Peter.” “Then what do you want?” “I want him to love me.” She had no answer. As far as she knew, Peter didn’t love anybody. Ender said nothing more. Just lay there.
There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally.
Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt.
I would follow such beauty, said something inside Ender. I would see as those eyes see.
If there’s a problem, you fix it. You don’t set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it.
In Valentine’s experience, normality was always a pretense, people acting out what they thought were their expected roles.
If you wait until you know everything, you never do anything.
I’ve learned all I’m ever going to learn from you.
But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind.
From you I can learn things that nobody knows.
So plans of attack, what good are they then? We try, we do what we can, but what really counts is what you do when command breaks down.
That’s why he hates you, because you didn’t suffer when he tried to punish you.
Don’t press her,” said Cooper. “If someone decides to leave something unsaid, my experience is that everyone is happier if they don’t insist on his saying it.
It was possible, wasn’t it, that he loved her, and that in this time of terrifying opportunity he was willing to weaken himself before her in order to win her love.
We need you to help us figure out how you can help us.
When your child goes off to war, you will never get him back. Not as he was, not the same boy. Changed, if he comes back at all.
By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science...