Heather's Library

Ender Series #8
Shadow of the Giant
by Orson Scott Card
p.11-12 Han Tzu waited until the armored car was completely out of sight before he ventured out into the bicycle-and-pedestrian-packed street. Crowds could make you invisible, but only if you were moving in the same direction, and that's the thing Han Tzu had never really been able to do, not since he came home to China from Battle School.
     He always seemed to be moving, not upstream, but crossways. As if he had a completely different map of the world from the one everyone around him was using.
     And here he was again, dodging bikes and forward-pressing people on their ten thousand errands in order to get away from the doorway of his apartment building to the door of the tiny restaurant across the street.
     But it was not as hard as it would have been for most people. Han Tzu had mastered the art of using only his peripheral vision, so his eyes stared straight ahead. Without eye contact, the others on the street could not face him down, could not insist that he yield the right of way. They could only dodge him, as if he were a boulder in the stream.

p.21 The irony was that the "great men" who were now humiliated and writing reports on their own mistakes were never the source of those errors. They only believed they were. And the underlings who had really originated the problems saw themselves as merely instruments of their commanders' will. But it was the nature of underlings to use power recklessly, since blame could always be passed either upward or downward.
     Unlike credit, which, like hot air, always rose.

p.22 My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.

p.31 Peter Wiggin had brought Petra Arkanian with him because she knew Caliph Alai. They had both been in Ender's Jeesh together. And it was Alai who had sheltered her and Bean in the months before the Muslim invasion of China--or the liberation of Asia, depending on which propaganda mill you shopped at.

p.39 As the old dead United Nations found out long ago, religion always has more warriors than some vague national abstraction."

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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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Ender Series #4
Children of the Mind
By Orson Scott Card
p.34-35 “Let me tell you the most beautiful story I know.
A man was given
a dog, which he loved very much,
The dog went with the man everywhere,
but
the man could not teach it to do anything useful.
The dog would not fetch or
point,
it would not race or protect or stand watch.
Instead the dog sat near
him and regarded him,
  always with the same inscrutable expression.
’That’s
not a god, it’s a wolf,’ said the man’s wife,
  ‘He alone is faithful to me,’
said the man,
and his wife never discussed it with him again.
One day the
man took his dog with him into his private
airplane
and as they flew over
high winter mountains,
the engines failed
and the airplane was torn to shreds
among the trees.
The man lay bleeding,
his belly torn open by blades or
sheared metal,
steam rising from his organs in the corld air,
but all he
could think of was his faithful dog.
Was he alive? Was he hurt?
Imagine his
releif when the dog came padding up and regarded him with that same steady gaze.

After an hour the dog nosed the man’s gaping abdomen,
  then began pulling
out intestines and spleen and liver
  and gnawing on them,
all the while
studying the man’s face.
’Thank God,’ said the man.
’At least one of us will
not starve’ “
     from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

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Ender Series #2
Speaker for the Dead
By Orson Scott Card
p. xvi I had observed before that one thing wrong with science fiction as whole was that almost all the heroes seemed to spring fully-grown from the head of Zeus—no one had families. If there was a mention of parents at all, it was to tell us that they were dead, or such miserable specimens of humanity that the hero could hardly wait to get out of town.
    Not only did they have no parents, few science fiction heroes seemed to marry and have kids. In short, the heroes of most science fiction novels were perpetual adolescents; lone rangers wandered the universe avoiding commitments. This shouldn’t be surprising. The romantic hero is invariably one who is going through the adolescent phase of human life. The child phase—the one I dealt with most often in my fiction—is the time of complete dependence on others to create our identity and worldview. Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt. They go along because they don’t know how to be alone either physically or intellectually.

p.xviiiMost novels get by with showing the relationships between two, or, at the most, three characters. This is because if the difficulty of creating a character increases with each new major character that is added to the tale. Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others. If there are only two significant characters, then there is only one relationship to be explored. If there are three characters, however, there are four relationships: Between A and B, between B and C, between C and A, and finally the relationship when all three are together.

p.xvii-xix Yet during this whole times I lived with my parents, coming down the mountain at insane speeds late at night, only to end up in a home where certain words were simply never said. And I never said them. Not once did I slip and speak in front of my family the way I spoke constantly in front of other performers at Sundance. This was not by any herculean effort, either: I didn’t think about changing my behavior; it simply happened. When I was with my parents I wasn’t the same person
    I have seen this time and time again with my friends, with other family members. Our whole demeanor changes, our mannerisms, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another. Listen to someone you know when they pick up the telephone. We have special voices for different people; our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with.

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