Children of the Mind

Children of the Mind is the fourth book of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series of science fiction novels.

• 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.

• 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.

• Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.

• 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.