Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me – to find out what you’re good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.
Ender Wiggin isn’t a killer. He just wins – thoroughly.
In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.? What is it then?? It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.
The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.
I’m crazy,” said Ender. “But I think I’m OK.
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind,” Jane intoned. “Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.
If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.
In philosophy class I think we finally decided that ‘good’ is an infinitely recursive term – it can’t be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it’s better than bad, though why it’s better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.
A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.
Firequencher raised his hand. “I’ve been staying out of family conversations. Do I get credit for that?
I came because I’ve spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it’s too late, before we’re not children anymore.
I didn’t want to hurt him!” Ender cried. “Why didn’t he just leave me alone!