“Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.”

“The freedom fighters in India's long struggle for independence from British rule, or members of the African National Congress, were once classed as terrorists. History, as they say, is written by victors, but history also has many cunning corridors - how much time must elapse before all those tricky side-passages are revealed?”

“I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.”

“Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.”

“People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more.”

“Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds.”

“There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you.”