"Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable."

"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."

"Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken."

"But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging."

"That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes."

"She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell.Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it.And it's delicious."

"What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody."

"Your motivation has to be rock solid. You have to want it so bad that even th threat of death won't take it from you."

"Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go."

"Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people."

"He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow."

"I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!"

"We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something."

"If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society."

"The kid is scary."

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

"Faith doesn't mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts."

"They're so brave," she said. "They're all dead." "Only a coward would think of that," she said scornfully."

"So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend."

"When you really know somebody you can't hate them. Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them."

"Her action in defending MarcA£o meant one thing to him and something quite different to her, it was so different that it was not even the same event."

"Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent."

"Achilles might be a good papa to the family, but he was also a killer, and he never forgives.Poke knew that, though. Bean warned her, and she knew it, but she chose Achilles for their papa anyway. Chose him and then died for it. She was like that Jesus that Helga preached about in her kitchen while they ate. She died for her people. And Achilles, he was like God. He made people pay for their sins no matter what they did.The important thing is, stay on the good side of God. That's what Helga teaches, isn't it? Stay right with God.I'll stay right with Achilles. I'll honor my papa, that's for sure, so I can stay alive until I'm old enough to go out on my own."

"Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging."

"Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk."

"I didn't know how you'd get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good."

"If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement."

"But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar-or Graff, if it was him-launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they'd risk a shuttle and it's crew just to catch me? I find that quite flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain."

"I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet."

"Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?"

"For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events."

"My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer."

"There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane."

"It was the waiting and watching that cost the most. For during that time he had to endure."

"Someone's senta loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing streama gain I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays up."

"My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man."When the planting's done," I said."Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.""Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left."

"As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, " I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school."