“For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.”

“And beauty has a quality all of its own that seems supreme; that seems above mere men with slaving ships and pistols...”

“Rules? Ixion is supposed to be free of rules, yet it seems as strict as Grave in its own way and more...more dangerous.”

“It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable”

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”

“All Being within this order, by the laws of its own nature is impelled to find its proper station round its Primal Cause.Thus every nature moves across the tide of the great sea of being to its own port, each with its given instinct as its guide.”