All education is self-education,” said Noxon. “And all self-education builds on the foundation provided by your teachers.
Two faces of the same coin. And I am the metal in between.
As for me,” said Alvin, “I’m neutral on lying, seeing as how there’s times when the truth just hurts people.” “I’m none too fanatic about telling the truth, myself,” said the woman. “For instance, I believe every girl ought to grow up in the firm belief that she’s clever and pretty, and every boy that he’s strong and good-hearted. In my experience, what starts out as a fib turns into a hope and if you keep it up long enough, it starts to be mostly true.
Lack of truthfulness doesn’t weaken a story if you can get enough people to believe the lie.
I miss you,” he said. “Get over it,” she said.
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.