Quotes About Clarity

Maybe I will do what I want with my life! The only problem is that I have no idea what I want to do with it.

I speak to everyone in the language they understand, said Ender. That isn't being slick. It's being clear

Ender was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was illusion, and the illusion had to die...the truth about ourselves. Somehow this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn't blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to this voice and let its power come to me so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

I tell students that suspense comes, not from knowing almost nothing, but from knowing almost everything and caring very much about the small part still unknown.

We know everything we knew that was worth knowing, that's a crucial distinction.

I am a Gordian knot. Don't unravel, just slice.

He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.

It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

Then he was done. He pulled away, rolled onto his back. "I'm sorry," he said. "You're welcome," she said. She believed in answering what people meant, not what they said.

I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be. My goal was that the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form. If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.

As they say, a word to the wise is sufficient. And here I've gone and written five paragraphs.

Maybe knowing about craziness means you don't have to fall for it.

Ah,' said Speaker. 'There's so much that we don't understand. And so much that you don't understand. We should tell each other more.

Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender's Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel's very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story's vision of the world is so relentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don't actually think or speak the way the children in Ender's Game think and speak.

Five chickens do not make a cow.

Now she understood that someone had to end the council by declaring specifically what had been decided and what must happen next. Without absolute clarity, people would go off and dither, especially if they had doubts about the decision.

to be deceived. You know why I am here." "Ah. I guess this means Dap filed a report.

He understood all the words, he just had no clue what was going on. The Aunts said what they meant. Or at least they meant what they said.

I speak to everyone in the language they understand," said Ender. "That isn't being slick. It's being clear.

Oh," said Wheaton. "Oh, I see. Yes, that does bring mathematics into it.

How could she have missed it? It was her knack, to see what people intended, what they were about to do. Yet she saw no further than his smile the first time they met, saw nothing but his genuine love and sympathy and concern for her. How could her knack have failed her?

Speakers for the dead apparently have an almost pathological reliance on the idea that people behave better when they know more.

He always knew the answer, even when she thought he wasn't paying attention.

After twenty-five years of marriage, they could see each other clearly without having to look.