#0040: Ender Series #6: Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card

[orbitaldiamonds]

Ender Series #6
Shadow of the Hegemon
By Orson Scott Card

p.91 You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake.

p.93 At the crest of one of Araraquara’s many hills there was a sorvete shop run by a Japanese-Brazilian family. The family had been in business there for centuries, as their sign proclaimed, and Bean was both amused and moved by this, in light of what Carlotta had said. For this family, making flavored frozen desserts to eat from a cone, or cup was the great cause that gave them continuity through the ages. What could be more trivial than that? And yet Bean came here, again and again, because there recipes were, in fact, delicious, and when he thought about how many other people for these past two or three hundred years must have paused and taken a moment’s pleasure in the sweet in their mouths, he could not disdain that cause. They offered something that was genuinely good, and people’s lives were better because they offered it. It was not a noble cause that would get written up in the histories. But it was not nothing, either. A person could do worse than spend some large percentage of his life in a cause like that.

p.139 As a psychiatrist, he would probably hall back on his one limitless resource—professional arrogance.

p.197 “Aren’t families complicated?” said Sister Carlotta.
     Ok, thanks, thou holy bitch, said Peter silently. You and Bean are the ones who complicated the situation, and now you make smug little comments about how much better it is for unconnected people like you. Well, these parents are my cover I didn’t pick them, but I have to use them. And for you to mock my situation only shows your ignorance. And, probably, your envy, seeing how you are never going to have children or even get laid in your whole life, Mrs. Jesus.

p.341 That was life. Pump it in, pump it out. Sleep and wake, sleep and wake. Oh, and a little reproduction here and there. But he was too young, and Sister Carlotta had opted out of that side of life. So for them the cycle had been pretty much the same. Find some meaning in life. But what? Bean was famous. His name would live in history books forever . Probably just as part of a list in the chapter on Ender Wiggin, but that was fine, that was more than most people got. When he was dead he wouldn’t care.

p.395 “Satyagrapha is something else. The willingness to endure great personal suffering in order to do what’s right.”