Xenocide (Ender's Saga #3)

by Orson Scott Card

wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.

“If I had any part of you in me,” said Han Fei-tzu, “I would not have needed to marry you to become a complete person.”

Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed.>

“If the old soldier can still stand up and salute, I say let him march in the parade.”

“If I’d known that saving a planet from destruction would mean my returning to a state of virginity, I’d never have agreed to it.”

“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.”

Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That’s when parents know the least and care the most, so they’re more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they’re right.”

<Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.>

Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved.>

you, too, are a believer.> <I understand belief.> <No—you desire belief.> <I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that’s what faith is.> <Or deliberate insanity.>

Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.

A pure soul must never grow attached to any one thing. A pure soul must expose himself to new things every day.

We are using two different meanings of the words truth and belief. You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story’s factuality—to whether it literally depicts a real event in the real world. Your inner sense of truth responds to a story’s causality—to whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions, the way the gods work their will among human beings.”

The only way to retrieve a secret, once it is known, is to replace it with a lie; then the knowledge of the truth is once again your secret.”

The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.”

“Perhaps they’re all too wise to attempt the task,” he said. “But you are young enough not to fancy yourself wise. You’re young enough to think of impossible things and discover why they might be possible.

to stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make the person stop wanting to do it.

I forgive you for loving me to excess. It is the gentlest and kindest of vices.”

“Right now, because we can’t find a natural explanation, the gods stand exposed for all of humanity to see, the unbelievers as well as the believers. The gods are naked, and we must clothe them.

She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.

Maybe xenocide is built into the human psyche as into no other species.

I believe that they do happen. I just don’t know if people accurately perceive which events are miracles and which are not. There are no doubt many miracles claimed which were not miracles at all. There are also probably many miracles that no one recognized when they occurred.”

while you certainly want your body back, it may be that God, in his great wisdom, knows that for you to become the best man you can be, you need to spend a certain amount of time as a cripple.”

“You’re one tough son of a bitch, aren’t you?” “Welders and smiths are tough. Sons of bitches have problems of their own. I’m just a servant of God and of the church, with a job to do.

“Does your Catholic God speak to you?” “Maybe he does. I never hear him, though. Or if I do, I never know that it’s his voice I’m hearing.”

<How do they manage it, these humans—beginning each time so innocently, yet always

You don’t know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them to, Mother, you’ll always feel betrayed. And because eventually everybody dies, you’ll always feel cheated. But you’re the cheat, Mother. You’re the one who uses our love for you to try to control us.”

“Because,” said Planter, who was now the spokesman for the surviving brothers, “we know that not all humans are alike, just as not all pequeninos are alike. Christ lives in some of you, and not in others. We are not all like Warmaker’s forest, and you are not all murderers either.”

Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society’s norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves—either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

“I love you,” Ender said. “As much as you’re capable of love,” she said. “And then only when you’ve got a little time left over from looking after everybody else. You think you’re some kind of guardian angel, with responsibility for the whole universe. All I asked you to do was take responsibility for my family. You’re good at loving people by the trillion, but not so good at dozens, and you’re a complete failure at loving one.”

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

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. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can’t punish him, because he can’t help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can’t honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you.”

<I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet.

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.

“So there are two pressures on males. The one is to spread their seed, violently if necessary. The other is to be attractive to females by being stable providers—by suppressing and containing the need to wander and the tendency to use force. Likewise, there are two pressures on females. The one is to get the seed of the strongest, most virile males so their infants will have good genes, which would make the violent, forceful males attractive to them. The other is to get the protection of the most stable males, nonviolent males, so their infants will be protected and provided for and as many as possible will reach adulthood.

How can I tell the good people from the bad, if the bad people all have some way of convincing themselves that they’re trying to do good even though they’re doing something terrible? And the good people can believe that they’re actually very bad even though they’re doing something good?

They’re all very happy. It’s intelligence that makes you unhappy. The workers are either hungry or not hungry. In pain or not in pain. They’re never curious or disappointed or anguished or ashamed.

whatever unease he suffered from was not a virus that could be killed, or driven from his life. His disease was at the root of his identity, and he didn’t know if he could ever be rid of it without destroying himself in the process.

What else has my passionate study of history been, except a search for humanity? Others find humanity by looking in their own hearts. Only lost souls need to search for it outside themselves.

homily. “God’s mercy has an infinite reach,” said the Bishop. “We can only hope he will choose to reach farther than we deserve, to forgive us for our terrible sins as individuals and as a people.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “I’ve made a covenant. I’ve made a promise.” “You made one to me, too,” he said. “Should I break a vow to God, so I can keep my vow with you?” “God would understand.” “How easily those who never hear his voice declare what he would and would not want.” “Do you hear his voice these days?” “I hear his song in my heart, the way the Psalmist did. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.” “The twenty-third. While the only song I hear is the twenty-second.”

Poor fool. Do you think that I, the hive queen, am free?> Do you think that human parents, once they bear young, are ever truly free again? If life to you means independence, a completely unfettered freedom to do as you like, then none of the sentient creatures is alive. None of us is ever fully free.