First Meetings In Ender's Universe Quotes
"But existing is not all I want. I want to do something. I want to learn everything and know everything and do every good thing."
"I've never been to a school. I don't know if I'll like it. Everybody I know is Polish and Catholic. I don't know what it's like to be with people who aren't."
"If you don't go into the Battle School program, there's nothing we can do about the rest."
"Can't we go somewhere and try it out? Can't we all go somewhere that we can go to school and nobody will care that we're Catholics and there are nine of us children?"
"A family with nine children will always be resented, no matter where you go. And here, because there are so many other noncompliant families, you sustain each other. There's solidarity."
"I'm trying to get a very promising boy to agree to come to Battle School because the world faces a terrible enemy."
"The reason you don't see them is because we defeated their first two invasions. And if you ever do see them, it will be because we lost the third time."
"But what if God wants us to win, so we have more time to repent of our wickedness? Don't you think we ought to leave that possibility open?"
"To take this gift from God and waste it? Didn't Jesus say something disparaging about casting pearls before swine?"
"You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it's all going to lead."
"The survival of the human race is at stake. There's a war on, you know."
"I won't come with you willingly unless my family is in a place where they can be happy."
"It's not about the credit. It's about the Hegemony perverting the whole system of science as a means of extortion."
"Why do you do this? Why do you close the door on everybody who cares about you?"
"As far as I know, I've only closed the door on people who want something from me."
"If only your legs get hit, then only your legs get frozen, and in nullo that's no sweat."
"You can't see with legs, you can't shoot with legs, and most of the time they just get in the way."
"We're all tools in somebody's kit. But that doesn't mean we can't make tools out of other people. Or figure out interesting things to use ourselves for."
"Together, we're smarter. And when you consider how incredibly bright we both are apart, it's downright scary to combine us."
"Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women."
"I want to be the one who, when I telephone you, I never make you cry."
"I don't even like you yet, and here you are taking liberties."
"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him."
"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be."
"If you're in one of the positions, Ender, you can hardly call them equal, whatever they are."
"It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other."
"I don't want to beat Peter. I want to beat them all and make them sorry."
"Ender smiled, and realized that if he broke this rule they'd probably kick him out of school, and that way he'd win for sure. He would never have to play a game again."
"His six commanders each took a part of the fleet and launched themselves against the enemy."
"Ender was doing nothing—he had thrown the game away."
"The weapons that blew up little ships didn't blow up the entire planet at first. But they did cause terrible explosions."
"Where the planet had been there was nothing. The simulator was empty."
"He wasn't sure whether to feel triumphant at his victory or defiant at the rebuke he was certain would come. So instead he felt nothing."
"You made the hard choice, boy. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it."
"Ender Wiggin, you never played me. You never played a game since I was your teacher."
"You needed a weapon, and you got it, and it was me."
"Weapons don't need to understand what they're pointed at, Ender. We did the pointing, and so we're responsible."
"I didn't. I cheated. I thought they'd kick me out."
"What will we do now that the war's over?" he said. Ender closed his eyes and said, "I need some sleep, Bean."
"He promised he would do it, and as the first step toward making a world safe for her, he wrote a short book about her, called The Hive Queen."
"He did what he did, and had to accept responsibility for it."
"It wasn't a biography—there was no time for such a level of detail. Rather it was more like a saga, telling the important deeds the man did—but judging which were important, not by the degree to which such deeds would have been newsworthy, but by the depth and breadth of their effects in the lives of others."
"His decision to build a house that he could not afford in a neighborhood full of people far above his level of income would never have rated a mention in the newsnets, but it colored the lives of his children as they were growing up."
"In the end, it was her quarrel with her husband that killed her son, for it led to the exhaustion and the stroke that felled him before he was fifty."
"Now that they could see the script that had been given him as a child, tears were shed."
"To be a speaker for the dead, you simply—Speak. And get asked to speak again."
"It's not a paying job, if that's what you're thinking."
"So if you're thinking of becoming a speaker for the dead, all I can say is, go for it. Just don't do a half-assed job. You're reshaping the past for people, and if you aren't going to plunge in and do it right, finding out everything, you'll only do harm and it's better not to do it at all."
"I promise you it's entirely legal, and he can't touch you for it. This is how the laws are written. They're designed to protect the fortunes of people as rich as you, while throwing the main tax burden on people in much lower brackets."
"Taking property was never sufficient cause for the taking of life."
"But it was of some comfort to the family that Benedetto, for all the shame and loss he had brought to them, despite the fact that he had caused his own separation from the family, first through prison and then through death, had loved them and tried to care for them."
"Nothing was any different, except that Andrew no longer had to worry about his taxes, and he took considerable interest in the obituary columns when he reached a new planet."