It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.
Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts – those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.
Only a fool closes the door when the wolf is already inside the barn.
I’m not one to despise other people for their sins. I haven’t found one yet, that I didn’t say to myself, I’ve done worse than this.
Once you realize that power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it, I think that there are worse people who could have it than Peter.
If you had any brains, you’d be in a real career, like selling life insurance.
Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.
It isn’t the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.
That is the Earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of the hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upward from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets and winds and birds. And the voice of one girl, who spoke to him out of his far-off childhood.
It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
I spend all my time thinking things through. It’s acting on my thoughts that gets tricky. Which ones should I act on, and which ones should I ignore?
Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?” “For both of us, Val.” “Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.” “But we don’t think like other children, do we, Val? We don’t talk like other children. And above all, we don’t write like other children.” “For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we’ve strayed from the topic, I think.
You get used to being naked, that’s the first thing that Ivan discovered. Crashing through thick brush with branches snagging at your bare skin, you stop worrying about who’s looking and and spend your time trying to keep yourself from being flayed alive. He got shy again when they entered the village, but once he decided simply to let the gawkers gawk, he found himself much more interested in what he was seeing than what they were.
Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.
I’ve had enough adventures,” said Noxon, “to know that boredom is the closest thing to happiness. Boredom means that there’s nothing wrong. You’re not hungry, you’re not in pain. Nobody’s making any demands on you. Your mind is free to think whatever you want. The only thing that makes boredom unpleasant is if you’re impatient for something else to happen.
If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you.
All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are “correct”. For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender’s Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.
Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “Salaam.” Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone.
I find out what I really want by seeing what I do,” said Ender. “That’s what we all do, if we’re honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously.
I’m just saying things never get so bad we can’t do something to make them better.