Ender's Shadow Quotes

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'
What is it then?'
It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.'

Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“A broken clock is right two times a day.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes."
"So God uses wicked people as his tools?"
"God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses."
"So, in the long run, God always wins?"
"Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Wiggin really doesn't care as much about himself as he does about these other kids who aren't worth five minutes of his time.
And yet this may be the very trait that makes everyone focus on him. Maybe this is why all those stories Sister Carlotta told him, Jesus always had a crowd around him.Maybe this is why I'm so afraid of Wiggen. Because he's the alien, not me. He's the unintelligible one, the unpredictable one. He's the one who doesn't do things for sensible, predictable reasons. I'm going to survive, and once you know that, there's nothing more to know about me. Him, though, he could do anything.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them―noticing them―that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The part of the man's statement that was true, however, was about the uselessness of speaking up. If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“So it's Mr. Wiggin and Who The Hell Are You.'

'About right,' Bean replied.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“So I want to ask you a hypothetical question.

My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Sister Carlotta, I'm on a leave of absence right now. That means I've been sacked, in case you don't understand how the I.F. handles these things.”
"Sacked! A miscarriage of justice. You ought to be shot.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“I would carry some of it if I could, Bean said silently. Like I did today, you can turn it over to me and I’ll do it, if I can. You don’t have to do this alone.

Only even as he thought this, Bean knew it wasn’t true. If it could be done, Ender was the one who would have to do it. All those months when Bean refused to see Ender, hid from him, it was because he couldn’t bear to face the fact that Ender was what Bean only wished to be — the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai.
"What?"
"About your having diarrhea."
"For you I'd get dysentery."
"Now that's friendship.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“You frighten me, when you say there isn't time."
"I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia."
"But it keeps not ending."
"So far, so good.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“But in the military you don't get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with.

The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out.

That was the military.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“I saw, I wrote, and the world changed a little.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow