How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"And this mother that you loved, had she already committed adultery?"
"Ten thousand times."
"I suspect she was not so libidinous as that. But you tell me that you loved her, though she was an adulteress. Isn't she the same person tonight? Has she changed between yesterday and today? Or is it only you who have changed?" (16.41-43)
Mostly Shmoop wanted to highlight this quote because the line "I suspect she was not as libidinous as that" is really funny. The book's take on sex is usually pretty serious, but every so often we get a zinger.
Quote #8
"The fathers are ripe on the bark. They put their dust on the bark, in the sap. We carry the little mother to the father the wives have chosen. She crawls on the bark, and the dust on the sap gets into her belly and fills it up with little ones." (17.161)
A lesson in piggie biology: not the birds and the bees, but the worms and the trees. In some ways this is the inverse of the Filhes. Not love without sex, but sex without love—and for that matter, sex without communication between a semi-sentient tree and a non-sentient worm. The novel likes thinking of ingenious ways to pry apart the interaction part of love from the sex part.
Quote #9
"What if they could find a way to let infant human girls conceive and bear children which would feed on their mother's tiny corpse?"
"What are you talking about!" said Ouanda.
"That's sick," said Ella.
"We didn't come here to attack them at the root of their lives," said Ender. "We came here to find a way to share a world with them. In a hundred years or five hundred years, when they've learned enough to make changes for themselves, then they can decide whether to alter the way their children are conceived and born." (17.173-176)
Sex is seen here as the root of people's lives—as it is for Marcao and Novinha, who Ender explains in his speaking largely on the basis of who they do or don't have sex with. More importantly though, Shmoop also appreciates Ender's little horror movie about infant human mothers having their babies eat their way out of the corpses. If he wasn't so busy writing biographies, maybe Ender could have been the futuristic Stephen King.