It's easy to manipulate your children when they're absolutely sure you're stupid.

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.

Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?

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 most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.

'So if we can we'll kill every last of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us. As for me,' said Ender, 'I'm in favor of surviving'.