“We need to write in a language that they can read.”

“He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good”

“They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”

“I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.”

“Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.”

“Online friends networks and dating sites, like the coffeehouse, are responding to the needs of introverts. We can write, not talk. We can get to the good stuff, and we can press delete as needed.”