Speaker for the Dead (Ender Quintet Book 2)

by Orson Scott Card

She had learned from her parents, from their files which she had studied like scripture, like a roadmap into herself: Nothing was to be destroyed, nothing forgotten. The sacredness of knowledge was deeper in her soul than any catechism.

To marry him would be to murder him. Yet not to marry him would be like murdering herself,

Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.

Maybe she couldn’t know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

“Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand.”

But to those who were not theologically sophisticated, while Satan was frightening and powerful, so was God. They understood well enough the continuum of good and evil that the Bishop referred to, but they were far more interested in the continuum of strong and weak—that was the one they lived with day by day. And on that continuum, they were weak, and God and Satan and the Bishop all were strong.

Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

“I think we’ve taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness.”

“You dream is a good one,” said Ender. “It’s the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways, though, to fulfil it. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, Only I will be great, and to make room for me the rest of you must give up even what you already have, and become nothing.

“I’m not one to despise other people for their sins,” said Ender. “I haven’t found one yet, that I didn’t say inside myself, I’ve done worse than this.”

It was the miracle of the wafer, turned into the flesh of God in his hands. How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

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.”

“And that’s as sure as we ever are of anything. We believe it enough to act as though it’s true. When we’re that sure, we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our lives on it.”

“There are worse reasons to die,” Ender answered, “than to die because you cannot bear to kill.”