“People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.”

“When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.”

“Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.”

“Okay, Troy...you're right. I'll take care of your baby for you...cause...like you say...she's innocent...and you can't visit the sins of the father upon the child. A motherless child has got a hard time. From right now...this child got a mother. But you a womanless man.”

“They say that rape is the only crime in which the victim has to prove her innocence. And I want you to know, I believe in your innocence. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

“I still don't know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason. But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well. Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?...Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”