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“The more people you love, the more you risk breaking your heart.”

“‘Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves.’” - Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince

“Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire's and Ramy's faces that they thought moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.”

"'It just doesn't feel...' Robin took a deep breath. 'It doesn't feel like we have the right to be alive.'"

"It sounded so abstract - just categories of use, exchange, and value - until it wasn't; until you realized the web you lived in the exploitations your life-style demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain. "

“Professor Lovell scoffed. ‘Never. I look at those men, and I think of the vast difference between us. I am where I am because I believe in knowledge and scientific progress, and I have used them to my advantage. They are where they are because they have stubbornly refused to move forward with the future. Men like that don’t scare me. Men like that make me laugh.’”

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods”

“For example: ‘You know how the French refer to an unfortunate situation? Triste comme un repas sans fromage. Sad as a meal without cheese. Which is, really, the state of all English cheese.”

“You make a jar, only it’s perforated with holes so the dormice can breathe, and the surfaces are polished so smooth that escape is impossible. You put food in the hollows, and you make sure there are some ledges and walkways so the dormice don’t get too bored. Most importantly, you keep it dark, so the dormice always think it’s time to hibernate. All they do is sleep and fatten themselves up.”

“…One of the greatest intellectual shifts in history involves the transition from Roman numerals to the more elegant Arabic numerals, whose place-value notation and concept of zero, signifying nothing, made possible new forms of mental arithmetic.”

“Mathematics is not divorced from culture. Take counting systems not all languages use base ten. Or geometry - Euclidean geometry assumes a conception of space not shared by all.“

“Robbery, butchery, and theft they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.”

“In Book IV, Chapter VII of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues against colonialism on the grounds that the defence of colonies is a drain on resources, and that the economic gains of the monopolistic colonial trade are an illusion. He writes: 'Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies. 'This view was not widely shared at the time.”

“Our kingdom is surrounded by the sea, yet I have never seen it…,” he confessed, grappling with every word. "I should like to stand before the very expanse that literati scholars have captured in their writings. To witness this vast eternity." There was a beat of silence, and then he murmured under his breath. “To believe that life is greater than this wretched moment.”

Wonsik ran both hands over his haggard face, and shaking his head, he murmured, "My daughter died when she was fourteen. My son's betrayal nearly killed me. The ones I loved most dragged me through the darkest of hours. Yet in the next life, I would still love them again.”

“History moves its course, Young Mistress Iseul,” he murmured, flipping the page of his journal. He took up his calligraphy brush again. “But it is the youth who point the current in its direction.”