I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it

What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

If you read to your kids you'll make readers out of them, partly because they'll associate reading with good parent time.

The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.

"We've devoted our lives to learning about them!" Miro said. Ender stopped. "Not from them."

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

someone's sent a loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing stream again I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays up