Ender's Game

Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along—the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.

Every time, I've won because I could understand the way my enemy thought. From what they did . I could tell what they thought I was doing, how they wanted the battle to take shape. And I played off of that. I'm very good at that. Understanding how other people think.

"You must be good company for yourself."

"Not me. My memories."

"Maybe that's who you are, what you remember."

"I taught you everything you know. But I didn't teach you everything I know."

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

Apparently Mazer meant it when he said he meant to break Ender down—and forcing him to play when tired and sleepy was just the sort of cheap and easy trick Ender should have expected.

azer wakened him before morning; the clock said 0340, and Ender felt groggy as he padded along the corridor behind Mazer. “Early to bed and early to rise,” Mazer intoned, “makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.”

eople were crazy for a while there. Mistreatment of children, negligent homicide—those videos of Bonzo’s and Stilson’s deaths were pretty gruesome. To watch one child do that to another.”