"If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”"

"Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain."

"This is the place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday."

"I am not a story, Mr Foe…I choose rather to tell of the Island, of myself and Crusoe and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire."

"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."

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

"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…"

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen."

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

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

"He is the child of his silence."

"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."

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

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

"It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes."

"I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me."

"Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart."

"But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate."

"At last I could row no further."

"Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering."

"Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy."

"The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of)."

"Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin."

"But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves."

"At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach."

"I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything"

"As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered"

"There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas"

"Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?"

"His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong"

"He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land"

"They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die"

"But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?"

"He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help."

"Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital."

"If she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies"

"Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet."

"Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people"

"You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'"

"Though this is a large country, so large that you would think there would be space for everyone, what I have learned from life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps. Yet I am convinced there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camp, not even to the catchment areas of the camps — certain mountaintops, for example, certain islands in the middle of swamps, certain arid strips where human beings may not find it worth their while to live. I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way."

"He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature."

"Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth."

"He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end."