Quotes from Ender's Shadow

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'
What is it then?'
It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.'

Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“A broken clock is right two times a day.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Wiggin really doesn't care as much about himself as he does about these other kids who aren't worth five minutes of his time.
And yet this may be the very trait that makes everyone focus on him. Maybe this is why all those stories Sister Carlotta told him, Jesus always had a crowd around him.Maybe this is why I'm so afraid of Wiggen. Because he's the alien, not me. He's the unintelligible one, the unpredictable one. He's the one who doesn't do things for sensible, predictable reasons. I'm going to survive, and once you know that, there's nothing more to know about me. Him, though, he could do anything.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes."
"So God uses wicked people as his tools?"
"God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses."
"So, in the long run, God always wins?"
"Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them―noticing them―that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The part of the man's statement that was true, however, was about the uselessness of speaking up. If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“So I want to ask you a hypothetical question.

My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“So it's Mr. Wiggin and Who The Hell Are You.'

'About right,' Bean replied.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai.
"What?"
"About your having diarrhea."
"For you I'd get dysentery."
"Now that's friendship.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“Sister Carlotta, I'm on a leave of absence right now. That means I've been sacked, in case you don't understand how the I.F. handles these things.”
"Sacked! A miscarriage of justice. You ought to be shot.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“I would carry some of it if I could, Bean said silently. Like I did today, you can turn it over to me and I’ll do it, if I can. You don’t have to do this alone.

Only even as he thought this, Bean knew it wasn’t true. If it could be done, Ender was the one who would have to do it. All those months when Bean refused to see Ender, hid from him, it was because he couldn’t bear to face the fact that Ender was what Bean only wished to be — the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

“When the messenger won't tell you what the hell the message is, my trigger finger gets twitchy. Dismissed.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Ender's Shadow

About the author

Popular quotes

“I was not crying - eyes water. I think we all know I'm a badass and I don't cry. - Caleb”
― C.J. Roberts, quote from Epilogue

“لاَ، لنْ أذكر اِسمهَا أبداً، و ذَلِك لأنهَا بهذَا القوامِ الأثيرِيّ الدَقيق المُحاط بالظبَاب، و بهاتيْنِ العينيْنِ الواسعتيْنِ، الدهشتيْنِ، البَراقَتيْن، التِي كانَت حياتِي تحْترِقُ و تنْصهِرُ خَلفَهما ببُطء وَ ألَم، لم تعُد تنْتسِبُ إلَى هذِهِ الدنيَا الوضِيعَة الوحشيّة. لاَ، ينْبغِي ألاَ ألوِثَ اِسمهَا بأشيَاء أرضيّة.”
― Sadegh Hedayat, quote from The Blind Owl

“Arius in his injured ankle; he drew a breath through his teeth. “Why her? Why not me?” He regarded her briefly. “Because you look like a ferret.”
― Kate Quinn, quote from Mistress of Rome

“Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”
― Anthony Marra, quote from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“I told Ersken, "Lately it's been like living on the knife's edge, never knowing which side I'll fall off on"
Ersken clapped me on the shoulder as we stepped into the street. "Cheer up, Beka. Maybe you were going to fall off that razor's edge before, but not today," he said, as good humored as always. "Today we're doing to jump.”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from Bloodhound

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.