#0035: Ender Series #1: Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

[orbitaldiamonds]

Ender Series #1
Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
p.xx Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.
   Because the book does ring true with the children who read it. The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when the school librarian at Farrer Junior High in Provo, Utah, told me, "You know, Ender's Game is our most-lost book."

p.2 Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

p.17 "It was all your genes that made us geniuses, Mom," said Peter. "We sure didn't get any from Dad."
   "I heard that," Father said, not looking up from the news that was being displayed on the table while he ate.
   "It would have been wasted if you hadn't."

p.35 "[...] Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me--to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools."
   "Is that all? Just tools?"
   "Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive."
   "That's a lie."
   "No. It's just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war."

p.37 "Just one more example of the stupidity of the military. If you had any brains, you'd be in a real career, like selling life insurance."
   "You, too, mastermind."

p.47 "So you beat me the first time I ever touched the game," Ender said. "If you can't do it twice, you can't do it at all."

p.126 We'll have the asteroid belt, but they'll have Earth, and you run out of raisins and celery kind of fast out there, without Earth.

p.206-207 "I'm glad you won. If I ever beat you, Ender, I want to do it fair."
   "Use what they give you," Ender said. "If you've ever got an advantage over the enemy, use it."
   "Oh, I did," said Slattery. "I'm only fair-minded before and after battles."

p.231 Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.