children of the mind.

I read Speaker for the Dead I just didn't do anything about it. This was such an amazing book! I want to meet this Orson Scott Card... his niece was my art teacher.

"There are too many of us all," said Miro. "But never enough."

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously."

For there is pain in Peter's eyes, and it was wrong of me to say he felt none. It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.

Aimainia rose from his breakfast table and went to the computer in his gardening shed. It was just another tool- that's why he kept it in here, instead of enshrining it in his house or in a special office the way so many did. His computer was like a trowel. He used it, he set it aside.

"Life is a suicide mission, Miro. Check it out- basic philosophy course. You spend your life running out of fuel and when you're finally out, you croak."

"What if I promise to like you no matter what?"
"You can't make a promise like that."

Have I lost my mind?
Or have I finally found my heart?

"I don't understand him at all," said Grace. "Except his words, I know the ordinary meaning of his words. But when he speaks, I can fell the words straining to contain the things he wants to say, and they can't do it. They aren't large enough, those words of his, even though he speaks in our largest language, even though he builds the words together into great baskets of meaning, into boats of thought. I can only see outer shape of the words and guess at what he means. I don't understand him at all."

"What is it to pay or not pay? Are we suddenly Christians, who pay for sins? No. The Yamato way is not to pay for error, but to learn from it."

Grego shook his head. "Yes it does, Olhado. Death undoes everything."
Olhado shrugged. "Then why do you bother doing everything, Grego? Because someday you will die. Why should anyone ever have children? Someday they will die, their children will die, all children will die. Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we were there, and during that time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth- what is, what was, what will be- not what could be, what should have been, what never can be. If we die, then our death has meaning to the rest of the universe. Even if our lives our unknown, the fact that someone lived here, and died, that will have repercussions, that will shape the universe." 

"Nor do I understand more than a glimmer of the way you think," said Human. "But isn't that a good thing, too? The mystery is endless. We will never cease to surprise each other."

Changing the world is good for those who want their name 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.