"Ender's Game," Vocabulary from Chapters 14-15

“We’ve planned out an impromptu course of study for him.

A gluttonous ascetic?

A gluttonous ascetic?

From the start, Ender was plagued by vertigo as he walked through the tunnels, especially the ones that girdled Eros’s narrow circumference.

Gradually, as he became more adept at controlling the fighter’s speed, direction of movement, orientation, and weapons, the game was made more complex.

He was able to turn enough to see the old man standing in the doorway, wincing and holding his back.

“There are miracles even relativity can’t pull off, Ender.”

Mazer’s face went inscrutable.

You, with your tiny reserve force, and their armada, those great big heavy-bellied starships launching their swarms of fighters.

Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future.

Ender watched as all his squadrons moved at once, each responding to its own situation, all guided by Ender’s overall command, but daring, improvising, feinting, attacking with an independence no bugger fleet had ever shown.

I was cut off from all the people that I loved, everything I knew, living in this alien catacomb and forced to do nothing of importance but teach student after student, each one so hopeful, each one, ultimately, a weakling, a failure.

Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

If you keep coddling us like this we’ll think you like us.”

Ender recognized the irony, of course, and answered with a long silence.

You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals.”

Men in uniform were hugging each other, laughing, shouting; others were weeping; some knelt or lay prostrate, and Ender knew they were caught up in prayer.

It was the moment he had been waiting for, to use Demosthenes’ influence with the mob and Locke’s influence with the intelligentsia to accomplish something noteworthy.

Let them spend the next fifty years poring over the passenger list, trying to figure out which one of them is the great demagogue of the Age of Locke.”

From fences with sharpened stakes that pointed outward he learned that there were marauding animals that were a danger to the crops or the herds.

The only name they knew was that of Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon of Earth; the only news that came was news of peace, of prosperity, of great ships leaving the littoral of Earth’s solar system, passing the comet shield and filling up the bugger worlds.

A deep depression in the middle, partially filled with water, was ringed by concave slopes that cantilevered dangerously over the water.

Wherever they stopped, he was always Andrew Wiggin, itinerant speaker for the dead, and she was always Valentine, historian errant, writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead.

Wherever they stopped, he was always Andrew Wiggin, itinerant speaker for the dead, and she was always Valentine, historian errant, writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead.