How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
So she let him draw her down to the bed, where he clung to her tightly until in only a few minutes sleep relaxed him arms… She might have been thrust out of the garden because of her ignorant sin like Eva. But, again like Eva, she could bear it, for she still had Libo, her Adao.
Novinha's comparing herself and Libo to Adam and Eve, and Pipo's death to their exile from the Garden of Eden. That connects Pipo's death to eating the fruit of the tree of life—and the piggies were trying to make Pipo into a tree for reproductive purposes. You could say the piggies are so confusing because they're familiar; the symbols seem to fit, but then they don't quite. Novinha ends up exiled from the garden because she doesn't understand, rather than because she does.
Quote #2
"'Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee." It was the sort of thing a poet says to his mistress, or even a husband to his wife, and the tu was intimate, not arrogant. (8.84)
Ender is saying this to Novinha. It's supposed to be about spiritual renewal, Shmoop supposes, but it's also sexual… which seems a little forward since they just met.
Quote #3
"In a way it's rather sweet of him," said Ender. "he'd rather believe that Marcao's disease was different from every other recorded case… Marcao's decay progressed like every other, testes first, and all of Novinha's children were sired by someone else." (9.67)
The doctor, Navio, can't read Novinha's sexual relationship. This is similar to the problem the colonists have with the piggies—they have all the reproductive pieces, but the piggies don't make sense to them. Sex in this book is a secret (or a bunch of secrets).
Quote #4
"No wonder Marcao was bitter and angry. Every one of her six children reminded him that his wife was sleeping with another man." (9.67)
Was Marcao bitter and angry because his wife was betraying him, or was he bitter and angry in the first place? He seems like he was pretty unhappy before he was married; you could even say that's why he got married. Is presenting him as a solved riddle fair to him? Is attributing his rage entirely to Novinha fair to her?
Quote #5
"The rules must be adapted to the strength of the Filhos de Mente," the Ceifeiro explained. "No doubt there are some that can share a bed and remain celibate, but my wife is still too beautiful, and the lusts of my flesh too insistent." (10.86)
The Filhes's chaste marriage has a number of parallels in the book—Ender's relationship with Valentine, Ender's relationship with Jane, Ouanda and Miro, and even Novinha and Marcao. Love without sex in the service of community is something of an ideal for Speaker.
Quote #6
Miro: The piggies call themselves male, but we're only taking their word for it.
Ouanda: Why would they lie?
Miro: I know you're young and naïve, but there's some missing equipment. (13.3-5)
Miro and Ouanda are joking about knowing about sex, which is ironic because they don't know anything about sex in their own families. Humans lie about sex a bunch; the piggies don't really, though. Maybe missing the equipment is conducive to truthfulness.
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.
Quote #10
It was all right for Human to take pride in his father's many matings, but as far as the wives were concerned, they chose fathers solely on the basis of what was good for the tribe. The tribe and the individual—they were the only entities the wives respected. (17.263)
The piggies are essentially eugenicists—they engage in planned mating in the interest of promoting good genes from the most valuable individuals. It's interesting that none of the humans seem to find this disturbing. Eugenics was an important part of Nazi thinking, is related closely to racism, and is one of the more unquestionably evil ideologies that humans have managed to inflict on each other. A race of determined eugenicists you'd think would at least merit some ethical discussion in the novel, but it doesn't.