Ender's Game Chapter 14 Quotes

Ender's Game Chapter 14 Quotes

How we cite the quotes:
(Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote 4

For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire. (14.82)

This is Ender’s thought on meeting Mazer Rackham – here’s a guy he can really relate to, since they’re both super geniuses and outcasts. If we were making a score sheet and counting points for each idea of community in this book – and we are – then this would be another point scored for the idea that you can only form a community with someone who’s your equal.

Quote 5

Ender imagined what it would be like to have his friends there with him, cheering or laughing or gasping with apprehension; sometimes he thought it would be a great distraction, but other times he wished for it with all his heart. Even when he had spent his days lying out in the sunlight on a raft in a lake, he had not been so lonely. Mazer Rackham was his companion, was his teacher, but was not his friend. (14.233)

Like Graff, Mazer loves Ender (see 14.308), but doesn’t shows it until the end. And so Ender is surrounded by friends, he just doesn't know it. Which is one of those funny moments: Ender knows that he’s Bean’s secret friend, but he doesn’t understand that other people might be his secret friend too.

Quote 6

[…] whenever he was given a problem that involved patterns in space and time, he found that his intuition was more reliable than his calculation […] (14.36)

In case you forgot how smart Ender is – maybe it slipped your mind that he learned arithmetic when he was three (1.54) – here we get another little (math-based) reminder. Ender is so smart that the right answer just seems to come to him. (This isn’t so unusual – the right answer comes to us all the time. And so does the wrong answer.)