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"You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through."

"Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs. One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them."

"Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To some degree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin."

"(Chapter 2)"

"But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love."

"Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them."

"I admire writers like J.M. Coetzee, Nuruddin Farah, Michael Ondaatje, I can name several."

"(whom of those you have read recently have you found impressive?) AO: The South Africans: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink."

"A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him…We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition."

"They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part."

"Can we visit it soon?" Aisha asks. "It's supposed to be warm this weekend." [...] "What do you say?" Aisha presses. "The pathway down should be clear enough to get close to the creek. We'll be sure to go slow, Ruth. Maybe we could borrow a wheelchair. Jelly? Are you in?"

"Confessions, apologies: why this thirst for abasement? A hush falls. They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off."

"Would you agree that Francis had a bit of a reputation? Did he sometimes exhibit unpredictable moods? Would you agree, Michael, that your brother possessed a history of violence?"

"Francis had always protected me. It was his instinct. He saw the vulnerability, understood it all too well. But in that final moment in Desirea's, he had tried to protect another. When a cop with his hand on his holstered gun grabbed Jelly and tried to pull him away, Francis had panicked. "Don't touch him," he'd said, reaching to still the weapon. It was a gesture with history, but unreadable by those around him holding power. The authorities had investigated, interviewed witnesses, pronounced their conclusions. "They called it lawful," I told Aisha. And what else could we do but each look away?"

"It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology."

"She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying."

"Because Costello is his mother’s maiden name, and because he has never seen any reason to broadcast his connection with her, it was not known at the time of the invitation that Elizabeth Costello, the Australian writer, had a family connection in the Appleton community. He would have preferred that state of affairs to continue.”"

"... the whole thing is disgraceful from beginning to end. Disgraceful and vulgar."

"I return to Mother's stretcher, and she's sitting up now, wearing a hospital gown as neatly as she can make it seem. When she reads my face, she smooths her hair, sits up straight, the paper beneath her making soft crinkling sounds. "It is a new day," she says firmly."

"The world around us was named Scarborough. It had once been called “Scarberia,” a wasteland on the outskirts of a sprawling city. But now, as we were growing up in the early ’80s, in the heated language of a changing nation, we heard it called other names: Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scar-bro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life."

"Always, there were stories on TV and in the papers of gangs, killings in bad neighborhoods, predators roaming close. One morning, I peered with Francis into a newspaper box to read a headline about the latest terror and caught in the glass the reflection of our own faces."

"Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is some­ thing constitutionally wrong."

"He is here, with her, out of love. *He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side.”"

"We had been stopped by the cops before. There was a routine to it all: we knew that if you carefully played along you’d eventually be released, if not with your dignity, then at least with your skin. But that night we sensed an urgency we hadn’t experienced before. With the blinding headlights upon me, I couldn’t process the commands."

"My thoughts ran to Friday… Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them."

"Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise."

"“You know,” he said, “you’ve got to work on things. … Like stepping into Desirea’s the way you did. Like always looking so unsure. You’ve got to be cooler about things, and not put everything out on your face all the time. You’ve got to carry yourself better and think about your look. Doesn’t matter how poor you are.”"

"To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…"

"I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of a castaway is a castaway at heart"

"“Norma and his mother have never liked each other. Probably his mother would have chosen not to like any woman he married.”"

"As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict."

"This is the place where bodies are their own signs."

"I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story."

"That is how it begins."

"Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen."

"We can bring [the island] to life only by setting it within a larger story."

"In Desirea’s, you postured but you also played. You showed up every one of your dictated roles and fates. Our parents had come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados, from Sri Lanka and Poland and Somalia and Vietnam. They worked shit jobs, struggled with rent, were chronically tired, and often pushed just as chronically tired notions about identity and respectability. But in Desirea’s, different styles and kinships were possible. You found new language, you caught the gestures, you kept the meanings close as skin."

"I do not love him, but he is mine."

"He is the child of his silence."

"What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it."

"In a sea of fallen leaves we sit, she and I, two substantial beings."

"The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs."

"I will leave behind my terraces and walls," he said. "They will be enough. They will be more than enough.”"

"Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story, who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken."

"She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man."

"Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty."

"To live in silence is to live like the whales."

"To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws."

"A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away."