“Dipped in chocolate, bronzed in elegance, enameled with grace, toasted with beauty. My lord, she's a black woman.”

“Without you, African mother, there would have been no us--African fathers, sons and daughters. Do we need to say any more African mothers, our own true goddesses! Let us praise you to the highest, telling the world about your righteousness. Let us tell the entire universe about your sacredness African woman.”

“The antonym of "forgetting" is not "remembering", but justice.”

“The first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first.”

“He did not appear to be a very tall man; what I could see of legs seemed stumpy, though heavily muscled. His chest was broad and deep. Later I learned that he swam in the sea almost every morning. His thick strong arms were circled with leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli... Puckered white scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest... Odysseos wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had thrown a lamb's fleece across his wide shoulders. His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair that showed a trace of grey. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as grey as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.”

“Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected—not to mention true—that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.”

“Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavouring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained.”