More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
Ender didn’t like fighting. He didn’t like Peter’s kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn’t like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
He noticed how Graff and the other officers were watching them. Analyzing. Everything we do means something, Ender realized.
But humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire.
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.”
“Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.”
He had won something, and against older boys. Probably not the best of the older boys, but he no longer had the panicked feeling that he might be out of his depth, that Battle School might be too much for him.
Well it was Bonzo’s own fault, for giving Ender an unreasonable order. Still, he would care only that Ender had beaten him, and then rubbed his nose in it by being magnanimous.
A small reserve, held back until the end of the game, can be decisive. And soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they’ve been given.
He always, always acted out of intelligent self-interest.
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.
The boys have to have a chance to be at peace, at rest, without someone listening, to favor or despise them depending on the way they talk and act and think.
“I’m only fair-minded before and after battles.”
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.
If it weren’t for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. “I didn’t fight with honor,” Ender added. “I fought to win.”
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
Every time, I’ve won because I could understand the way my enemy thought. From what they did. I could tell what they thought I was doing, how they wanted the battle to take shape.
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. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.”
“What else should you be? Human beings didn’t evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing’s the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we’d be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.”
“If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”
Our genes won’t let us decide any other way. Nature can’t evolve a species that hasn’t a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we’ll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they’ll kill every last one of us.”
He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, something that was part of someone else’s plan and not his own, he would find out more information by waiting than by asking.
“Don’t start apologizing for them, Ender. Just because they didn’t know they were killing human beings doesn’t mean they weren’t killing human beings.
“Early to bed and early to rise,” Mazer intoned, “makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.”
“Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.
