Shadow Puppets

"You're the Hegemon. You're above nationality. And so, I might add, are we." p.165

"The future happiness of the human race depends on good people who want to live at peace with their neighbors, and who are willing to protect their neighbors from those who don't want peace. I'm only on e of those people." p.194

"When nothing was clear, I asked questions until clarity emerged." p.222

"Ender said that you can't defeat a powerful enemy unless you understand him completely, and you can't understand him unless you know the desires of his heart, and you can't know the desires of his heart until you truly love him." p. 227

"He has no hope. No dream. He tries everything to find one. He goes through the motions of love and kindness, or anything else that might work, and still nothing means anything. Each new conquest only leaves him hungry for another. He's hungry to find something that really matters in life. He knows we have it. Both of us, before we even found each other, we had it." p.229

"The compassion she had noticed before was more visible than ever. His eyes were full of love. But there was fire in him, too, and dignity. He did not smile--which was proper for the leader of nations which were now at war, and whose sons were dying in combat, and killing, too. Nor did he rant, whipping them up into some kind of dangerous enthusiasm." p. 314

"In the college she had briefly attended, between coming home from space and being brought into Indian military headquarters in Hyderabad, she had quickly realized that intellectuals seemed to think that their life--the life of the mind, the endless self-examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers--was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people.

"Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdrew from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.

"In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasingly about them." p.320

"First, Petra, there's no us. You're a pregnant woman, and I don't care how brilliant you are at military affairs, I can't possibly deal with Achilles if the woman who's carrying my baby is standing there in jeopardy." p. 340

"I know you!" she insisted.
"No. You don't. But that's all right, because I don't really know me either, let alone you. We never understand anybody, not even ourselves. But Petra, shh, listen. What we've done is, we've created something else. This marriage. It consists of the two of us, and we've become something else together. That's what we know. Not me, not you, but what we are, who we are together. Sister Carlotta quoted somebody in the Bible about how a man and a woman marry and they become one flesh. Very mystical and borderline weird. But in a way it's true. And when I die, you can't have Bean, but you'll still have Petra-with-Bean, Bean-with-Petra, whatever we call this new creature that we've made." p.347