"No doubt it was all an elaborate pretense at normality, but in Valentine's experience, normality was always a pretense, people acting out what they thought were their expected roles."

"We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we "understand." Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then."

"Genocide leads to the end of a person's life. link Xenocide"

"All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe."

"Your trust in rationality makes you irrational."

"Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent."

"Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon."

"Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet."

"I'm all the more in need of good advice, since I can’t actually conceive of needing any."

"If only we were wiser or better people perhaps the gods would explain the mad, unbearable things they do."

"I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them."

"What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide?"

"You'd think she'd learn something from that. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people’s lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don't want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she's saving them from."

"The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge."

"But he did love her, with all his heart he loved her. All his heart? All of it he knew about."

"All our rationalities are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons."

"Love was the genes of all creatures demanding that they be replicated, replicated, replicated."

"Life is a suicide mission."

"Is the brain a map that leads down twisted paths and into hidden corners? Then when we die, the map is lost but perhaps some explorer could wander through that strange landscape and find out the hiding places of our misplaced memories."

"You couldn't bear to let another man leave you, so you left him first."

"What had been lost was found again. And those who had been hungry without knowing the name of their hunger, were fed."

"I have a sense of comfortableness in love; it isn't grand sweeping passions that I expected to feel."

"The price of having these emotions, these passions, is that you have to control them, you have to bear them when they're too strong to bear."

"She wants what everybody wants — to be loved and cared for, to be part of something beautiful and fine, to have the respect of those she admires."

"I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two. The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew. The changeless part was always true, the growing part was always new, and I wondered, when the tale was through, which part was me, and which was you."

"He chose this world as his home, not just because there was a family that needed him, but also because in this place he did not have to be entirely a member of the human race... He could be part of something larger than mere humanity."

"Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear."

"That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very very good."

"Would I tame this great being and make her so much my slave that every moment of her time belongs to me? Would I focus her eyes so they can see nothing but my face? I should rejoice that I am part of her, instead of resenting I'm not more of her."

"Don’t ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there; you’ve seen nothing but the map."

"Marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman; even the beasts cleave together and produce their young. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman on one side and their community on the other."

"His eyes were seductive with understanding."

"Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant."

"You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there’s never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapien."

"I understood that she didn’t want to be liked. As if she were a visitor who expected to go back home any day."

"The best parts of my intellectual life are tangential, in areas outside my expertise. I supposed because within my area of expertise, the regulations they have placed upon me make it impossible to know or understand anything."

"Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him."

"No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."

"The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and therefore should be treated with great caution."

"Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand."

"Are you ready to reveal yourself to the rest of humanity?" "I’ve always been ready. The question is, are they ready to know me?"

"I carry the seeds of death with me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die."

"[They] knew each other so well that there was often nothing to say. But without her there, [he] grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to."

"I want to understand everything," said Miro. "I want to know everything and put it all together to see what it means." "Excellent project," she said. "It will look very good on your resume."

"We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe."

"Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head."

"But they knew from that day forward who the piggies were, just as the readers of the Hive Queen had understood the buggers, and the readers of the Hegemon had understood humankind in its endless quest for greatness in a wilderness of separation and suspicion."

"You killed more people than anybody in history." said Olhado, "Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.” said Ender"

"The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them."