"You were baptized?""My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it." The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. "Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in."

"I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more."

"We have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they're workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we're on the right track."

"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden."

"The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow."

"We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness-the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction."

"How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday."

"The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you."

"I listen to music constantly while writing."

"Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else."

"I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid."

"As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what "just living" might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway."

"It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise."

"Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth."

"When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes."

"The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don't throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong- for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane."

"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 a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards 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."

"What a waste of time to be posthumously famous."

"In my experience, influence is power."

"I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people."

"The essence of training is to allow error without consequence."

"Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it."

"Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals by fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged but in the creature judging, and when we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have."

"It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it."

"Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier then he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier."

"You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research."

"«Linkeree does what he likes. He likes to be alone and think his own thoughts. No one is hurt by it.» Sara said, «Jason said that we are one people. Linkeree is saying he does not want to be part of us, and if he is not part of us then we are all less than we were.» They were both very wise. It would be so much easier for Kapock if they had only agreed with each other."

"I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father."

"If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species."

"As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday."

"What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation."

"Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement."It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live."

"A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone."

"You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not."

"God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause."

"Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery."

"When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer."

"She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better."

"But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies."

"And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor."

"Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment."

"I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for."

"The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game."

"It's there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees-knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying."

"I'm hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what's going to happen next, so you always have to be ready for anything, ready to improvise, determined to win no matter what. I'm also making you miserable."

"My father once told methat there are no gods;only the cruel manipulationsof evil peoplewho pretended that their power was goodand their exploitation was love.But if there are no gods;why are we so hungry to believe in them?Just because evil liarsstand between us and the godsand block our view of themdoes not mean that the bright halothat surrounds each liaris not the outer edges of a god, waitingfor us to find our way around the lie."

"The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible."

"If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine.And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask."

"You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'We can't both be Alexander.'Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between."

"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."