Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet.
Yes, the bear was smart—for a bear—able to figure out about stone-throwing—he had never seen that behavior on the Discovery Channel.
I'm just saying things never get so bad we can't do something to make them better.
Perhaps someday, confronted by the consequences of your own actions, you might change, but I doubt it. Few who are captured by such a powerful story are ever able to win free of it.
Heck, everything we decide will be wrong," said Step, "because no matter what we do, something bad will happen later. So I refuse to regret any of it.
Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive. That's a lie. No. It's just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.
I am a Gordian knot. Don't unravel, just slice.
Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...
If I could make my heart hard," said Alvin, "I'd be a worse man, but a happier one.
Endurance, after all, was a kind of victory; a kind of heroism, too.
And I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions.
Well, I'm your man. I'm the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned. I'm your tool, and what difference does it make if I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game, I agreed with them, and was glad.
Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing.
His 'philosophy' seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either.
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.
He thought of half a dozen ideas before he went to sleep. Ender would be pleased-every one of them was stupid.
You really are playing God. I most certainly am not playing.
In the face of a threat to the survival of the species, all these planetside trivialities are put aside until the crisis passes.
Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
You don't know who a person is until you see how he acts when given unexpected power. He hasn't rehearsed for the part. So what you see is what he is.
Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.
I always think of books as being like people. Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don't have to seek them out and spend time with them.
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 seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself.
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.
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.
This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe, and those we never think to question.
If there is no awe, there is no audience.
He always told the truth, but he didn't always tell it all.
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.
Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.
You're not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.
Rigg," said Father, "you're so smart and so dumb at the same time that it almost takes my breath awway.
He had led missions inside China before, but always for the purpose of sabotage or intelligence gathering, or involuntary high officer force reduction, Peter's mostly-ironic euphemism for assassination.
In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.
You get so you kind of like the feeling of being hungry.
The enemy's gate was down.
Stubborn' just means you don't want to do something somebody else wants you to do, and ‘annoying' just means somebody else is frustrated that you won't obey them.
You just live in the place you're in, you don't worry about where you used to be or where you wish you were, here is where you are and here's where you've got to find a way.
When your child goes off to war, you will never get him back. Not as he was, not the same boy. Changed, if he comes back at all.
By the time they got home, they were both thoroughly bilingual in cursing.
But what kind of race is it, when the racers never let go of each other's hands, and the winner pulls the loser laughing over the finish line?
That was great. They're calling him Buttwatcher now. Just Watcher in front of the teachers, but everybody knows what he's watching.
First thing we need to do, said Bean, is split up. No, said Petra. I've done this before, Petra. Going into hiding. Keeping from getting caught. And if we're together we're too identifiable, la la la, she said. Saying ‘la la la' doesn't mean it isn't true.
Their friendship, remembered from the battle school days, gradually disappeared. It was to each other that they became close; it was with each other that they exchanged confidences.
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.
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.
What if the first homo sapiens had felt that way? We'd all still be neanderthals, and when the Buggers came they would have blasted us all to bits and that would be that. We didn't evolve from neanderthals, said Bean. Well, it's a good thing we have that little fact squared away, said Petra.
Isolation is the optimum environment for creativity.
The future happiness of the human race depends on good people who want to live at peace with their neighbors, and who are willing to protect their neighbors from those who don't want peace.
