“It was a poor thing she felt for anyone to be born a foreigner.”

“Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

“She hadn't lied. She hadn't betrayed anyone's trust; still, she felt she had done something wrong. Or rather, she had not yet done the right thing. Was there a difference between these two sins?”

“And she[Aphrodite]mourned Nerites` loss not because Nerites was her paramour but because she was her mentor.It was, strangely enough,poor Nerites who had taught her all she had known about sex & love until then. For how was a young Goddess, who was born from a cockle, to know about such things?”

“I was born to poor because of honest parents.”

“But she was half in love with chaos... With all her yearning for the ordinary life, she was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream.”