"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be." (Ender's Game)

...I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.

A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.

... It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said that when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth. (Ender's Game)

"The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven." (Xenocide)

"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space."