At first it was the man of real authority they noticed, but later, where everyone had authority, it was his cargo they cared to see.
Why else do we read anyway? I think most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-real world. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.
To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness.
There are miracles even reactivity can’t pull off, Ender.
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that’s so.
They also knew that Ender trusted them to do as they judged best when he gave them no orders.
That was the difference between her and the idiots of the world. They were all trying to look smart and keep their social standing. Whereas Valentine didn’t care about social standing, she cared about getting it right. Getting the truth – when the truth was gettable.
But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them.
Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.
Ender’s Game is not simply a story of an exceptional child who must outwit aliens in order to save the human race – it is the story of an exceptional child who fears he is a monster and is tricked into doing something monstrous.
That is the tragedy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it.
Power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it.
Then the raft rocked, and she turned to see Ender calmly crushing the life out of the wasp with one finger. “These are a nasty breed,” Ender said. “They sting you without waiting to be insulted first.
There’s never enough information... That’s the great tragedy of human knowledge. No matter how much we think we know, we can never predict the future.
Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of “science fiction writers”, who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants.
Cuando conoces de verdad a alguien, no puedes odiarle. Tal vez sea que no puedes conocer a nadie de verdad hasta que dejas de odiar.
Names come and go. They get attached to you, and then you lose them, and they get attached to someone else.
From now on, as far as you’re concerned, Dink Meeker is God.’ ‘Then who are you?’ ‘The personnel officer who hired God.
Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender’s Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel’s very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story’s vision of the world is so relentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.