Xenocide (Ender's Saga #3)

by Orson Scott Card

She felt contained in his embrace, never confined.

the imagined future that you seize upon as the foundation for all your moral judgments, is the only future in which everyone that you and I have ever loved and everything we’ve ever hoped for must be obliterated.” “I didn’t say I liked that future—” “I didn’t say you liked it either,” said Valentine. “I said that’s the future you choose to prepare for. But I don’t. I choose to live in a universe that has some hope in it.

I hope the same things you hope. I even hope that someday I’ll get more of my body back again. If I didn’t have hope I’d be dead. The things I told you just now aren’t because I despair. I said all that because these things are possible. And because they’re possible we have to think of them so they don’t surprise us later. We

have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we’ll already know how to live in that universe.”

He didn’t cry anymore, but he did let her hold him for a minute or two. Maybe it helped. Valentine had no way of knowing. Then he was done. He pulled away, rolled onto his back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re welcome,” she said. She believed in answering what people meant, not what they said.

“I hope so,” said Han Fei-tzu. “If she didn’t, the gods will surely save the echo of it and put it in a seashell and let her listen to it whenever she puts it to her ear.” This sort of fanciful storytelling was a game they had played together as children. Qing-jao set aside her dread and quickly came up with an answer. “No, the gods will save the touch of our embrace and weave it into a shawl, which she can wear around her shoulders when winter comes to heaven.”

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

How are you able to speak directly into Ender’s mind?> <Now that we know where he is, it’s as natural as eating.> <How did you find him? I’ve never been able to speak into the mind of anyone who hasn’t passed into the third life.> <We found him through the ansibles,

and the electronics connected to them—found where his body was in space. To reach his mind, we had to reach into chaos and form a bridge.> <Bridge?> <A transitional entity, which partly resembled his mind and partly ours.> <If you could reach his mind, why didn’t you stop him from destroying you?> <The human brain is very strange. Before we could make sense of what we found there, before we could learn how to speak into that twisted space, all my sisters and mothers were gone. We continued to study his mind during all the years we waited, cocooned, until he found us; when he came, then we could speak directly to him.> <What happened to the bridge you made?> <We never thought about it. It’s probably still out there somewhere.>

“Any animal is willing to kill the Other,” said Ender. “But the higher beings include more and more living things within their self-story, until at last there is no Other. Until the needs of others are more important than any private desires. The highest beings of all are the ones who are willing to pay any personal cost for the good of those who need them.”

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.

“I think you don’t grow up until you stop worrying about other people’s purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.”

“The only difference between a warning and a threat is whether you’re the person giving it or the person receiving it,” said Quara.

“No,” said Miro. “The difference is how the person means it.”