He could just look at people and listen to them and suddenly he'd know things about them.
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.
For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger...
Firequencher raised his hand. I've been staying out of family conversations. Do I get credit for that?
Everything we do means something, Ender realized. Them laughing. Me not laughing. He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn’t think of any jokes, and none of theirs see...
Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.
Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.
Ender knew that at this moment he might be able to walk out of the room and end the battle. The way he had escaped from the battleroom after drawing blood. But the battle would only be fought again. A...
Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That wa...
Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what? asked Wang-mu.I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes, said...
Come on, he said to Valentine one day. Let’s fly away and live forever.We can’t, she said. There are miracles even relativity can’t pull off, Ender.We have to go. I’m almost happy here.So, stay.I’ve l...
Come in, Bean. Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games wit...
Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others.
Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. A...
Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and some...
As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes
As history shows us, when colonization is voluntary, people will self-select better than any testing system. It’s like those foolish attempts to control immigration to American based on the traits tha...
And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: Tut-tut, what at botch that was? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we t...
And that's as sure as we ever are of anything. We believe it enough to act as though it's true. When we'r'e that sure, we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our lives on it.