Some books are worth crying over.

Here are some of my favorite snippets, including more than one which brought me to tears, from the timeless gem Ender’s Shadow.

• Her knowledge was a banquet, and if he remained quiet enough, he would be able to stay and feast.
• “Yes, I’m paranoid and xenophobic. That’s how I got this job. Cultivate those virtues and you, too, might rise to my lofty station.”
• Had Achilles’ name come up? No. He had just been referred to as “another irresponsible decision endangering the future of the human race, all because of some insane theory about games being one thing and genuine life-and-death struggles being another, completely unproven and unprovable except in the blood of some child!” That was Dap, who had a tendency to wax eloquent.
• Not so good for the rest of us, but it’s not like you’re our father or something. More like a brother, and 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.
• “You frighten me, when you say there isn’t time.” “I don’t see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.” “But it keeps not ending.” “So far, so good.”
• “I’ll listen to you, Colonel Graff. And please stop assuring me of how respectful you are whenever you’re about to tell me I’m an idiot.”
• The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don’t throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. 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.
• “Let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” Then the little one burst into tears and clung to his mother, and kissed his father’s hand. “Welcome home, little brother,” said Nikolai. “I told you they were nice.”