#0039: Ender Series #5: Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card

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Ender Series #5
Ender's Shadow
by Orson Scott Card
p.9 Everyone knew that Rotterdam was, if not the capital, then the main seaport of Hell.

p.40 "I think I have someone for you."
     "You've thought that before."
     "He's a born leader. But he does not meet your physical specifications."
     "Then you'll pardon me if I don't waste time on him."
     "If he passes your exacting intellectual and personality requirements, it is quite possible that for a miniscule portion of the brass button or toilet paper budget of the I.F., his physical limitations might be repaired."
     "I never knew nuns could be sarcastic."
     "I can't reach you with a ruler. Sarcasm is my last resort."

p.62 Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but she hadn't figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as Bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. If God loved them so much, and he could do whatever he wanted, why didn't he let them die sooner or not even be born at all, so they didn't have to go through so much trouble and get all excited about trying to be alive when he was just going to take them to his heart. None of it made any sense to Bean, and the more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why would Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?

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

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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.

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