Hold onto your hats...I finally read it. And found it extremely hard to put down! More thoughts coming soon. Friends, what do you recommend a fan of this series read next? I get this question a lot and am just as clueless having read it. It's not like anything else I've read (but I'm not particularly a sci-fi reader). Asimov, Star Wars, military history? 
 Favorite quotes: 
 from Intro: 
 And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimov's story had done for me. 
 I understood, at levels deeper than speech, how a great military leader imposes his will on his enemy, and makes his own army a willing extension of himself. 
 Soldiers and commanders would have to think very differently in space, because the old ideas of up and down simply wouldn't apply anymore. 
 It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea. Asimov, having had the idea of paralleling The Decline and Fall, still had no story; his genius--and the soul of the story--came when he personalized his history, making the psychohistorian Hari Seldon the god-figure, the plan-maker, the apocalyptic prophet of the story. I had no such character, and no idea of how to make one. 
 I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn--that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. 
 And in writing Ender's Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. 
 The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when the school librarian at Farrer Junior High in Provo, Utah, told me, "You know, Ender's Game is our most-lost book." 
 Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language--or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself. 
 The story of Ender's Game is not this book, though it has that title emblazoned on it. The story is the one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together. 
 * * * 
 Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. 
 Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him. 
 "See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world." 
 the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you. 
 In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. 
 When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. 
 "Strange dreams are a safety valve, Ender. I'm putting you under a little pressure for the first time in your life. Your body is finding ways to compensate, that's all. 
 (view spoiler)[ 
 "And it had to be a child, Ender," said Mazer. "You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for." 
 "People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world." 
 it was plain to him now that they would not bring him back at all, that he was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person. (hide spoiler)]