"Because these fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give the..."
- Orson Scott Card
"It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in..."
- Janet Frame
"Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down."
"I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there."
"And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?"
"I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy."
"I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid."