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Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it 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.
Orson Scott Card
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote reflects the concept that sometimes lies can provide more comfort and predictability than the truth.

In this quote, the author suggests that the adult's reassurance that pain will not happen often turns out to be a falsehood. It highlights the irony that, in some situations, lies can offer a sense of security or predictability that the harsh truth cannot provide. The quote implies a deeper philosophical observation about the nature of truth and deception in human experiences.

Themes

TruthLiePainPredictionComfort

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of honesty in relationships.

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