“The organs of Venus are familiar to all, but oh, my brothers, the organ of Saturn is the bladder.”

“The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

“Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day--as a votive offering to human knowledge--but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men--with one young woman--and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire.”

“...where there's Hilo, oh, there's blissweed.”

“Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.”

“. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.”

“All these people like my mother paying counselors and clinics to reattach them to reality; all of us people here paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality.”