"To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard size and real but blurred; the way I played with my first pair of dark glasses, moving between the dazzle and the coolness; or the way, on this first return, when I was introduced to air-conditioning, I liked to move from the coolness of an air-conditioned room to the warmth outside, and back again. I was in time, over the years, and over many returns, to get used to what was new; but that shifting about of reality never really stopped. I could call it up whenever I wished. Up to about twenty years ago whenever I went back I could persuade myself from time to time that I was in a half-dream, knowing and not knowing."

"With learning now I can tell you more or less how we all came to be where we were.... I can give you that historical bird's eye view. But I cannot explain the mystery of Leonard Side's inheritance. Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we all of us go back to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. I might say that an ancestor of Leonard Side's came from the dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that would only be a fragment of his inheritance, a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves."