"When you have faith in something a lot of other people believe then you a member of the church" said Ceas, "When you have faith in something nobody believes, then you a complete wacko."

"They have influence, but no power." "In my experience, influence is power."

"The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe."

"With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets."

"I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don't want to go through what you've been through to get there."

"If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault."

"Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him."

"I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

"But my eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin."

"I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt."

"Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me-to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools."

"And were you punished? No. Why? Because you were rich.""Money and talent aren't the same thing.""That's because you can inherit money that was earned by your ancestors," said Sister Carlotta. "And everybody recognizes the value of money, while only select groups recognize the value of talent."

"Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going."

"Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price."

"I taught you everything you know. But I didn't teach you everything I know."

"The next day he passed Alai in the corridor, and they greeted each other, touched hands, talked, but they both knew that there was a wall there now.It might be breached, that wall, sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken."

"We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best."

"My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer."

"Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open."

"Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It's a look that no human eyes should ever have."

"When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end."

"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 with your life."

"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."

"I've learned all I'm ever going to learn from you."

"In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now."

"Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes.""So God uses wicked people as his tools?""God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses.""So, in the long run, God always wins?""Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable."

"I believe what Jesus said was, 'I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive. But of you it is required that you forgive all men."

"Nero, you are an example to all the children on this shuttle. Because most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it's actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have a chance to learn."

"Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf."

"O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man's mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!"

"I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy."

"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."

"But it was not the boyish grin she had known when he bounded along the low-gravity inner corridors of Battle School. This smile had weariness in it, and old fears long mastered but still present. It was the smile of wisdom."

"I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions."

"I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school."

"And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again."

"Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true."

"He committed the crime of stupidity while under my command," said Citizen."Oh my," said Rigg. "They're handing out the death penalty for that these days?"

"Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction."

"Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered."

"This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?""I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?""Yes," she said."That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours."

"Madness, and then illumination."

"So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other."

"The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy."

"I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then."

"The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together."

"A person is what he says and does, that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured."

"My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you."

"The emotion she could deal with best was anger."

"He thinks I'm like him, Mazer realized. That's what we do as humans; it's how we read minds. We assume that other people think like we do. So if we're nasty and suspicious and conniving we assume that everyone is as nasty and suspicious and conniving as we are."