“There were three of them there, then, and Amabella was introducing Bod and he was shaking hands and saying, "Charmed, I'm sure," because he could greet people politely over nine hundred years of changing manners.”

“Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found...That's out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year....Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.”

“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”

“The bible says that a good shepard, even if he has one hundred sheep, if he loses but one of them in the wilderness, he must leave the other ninety-nine behind to go looking for that one.”

“Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.”

“They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma [an honorific title for a woman] and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon. It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. [emphasis mine] It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”