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Human variability is immense. We see and hear in varying degrees, our limbs are of different lengths and strengths, our minds process information differently, we communicate using different methods and speeds, we move from place to place via diverse methods, and our eye colors are not the same. Some of us can soothe children, some have spiritual insight, and some discern the emotions of others with astounding skill. Which bodily and mental variabilities are considered inconsequential, which are charming, and which are stigmatized, changes over time-and that is the history of disability.

Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are. A peevish moment of wonderment as to where the real world lies. (chapter 1)

Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why. (chapter 3, p94)

All worked excellently, until fighting began.

The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots.

Minette pushed away her plate and stood up. What she wouldn't have given to be alone for a moment, just a moment. Oh, to have a room of my own, to be able to close myself up somewhere to think and to cry as much as I want! she thought to herself. (chapter IX, p120)

Time, in all crises, is usually the ingredient missing to make a solution. It is best supplied by an agreement on a pause.

The eyes, if one knows them well, rarely lie (chapter XXII, p342)

War’s rancours are quick to bite and slow to heal.

At twelve, she already understood many things. She accepted them as inevitable, yet questioned them all the same. Why? Why were things this way and not another? Why were some people rich and others poor? Why did people beat their slaves? Why were some masters kind and others cruel, some priests good and others evil? Why did catechism teach the things it did and why did the priests act the way they did? They said: we are all brothers, but then they bought slaves and beat or otherwise tortured them. Why should she have to hide herself in order to learn to read? Why had Rosélia, one of the neighborhood vendors, been imprisoned for hiding a runaway slave? And above all, why - knowing what could happen - had she hidden that slave, who she did not even know? (chapter I, p17)

Within fifteen years of the war’s end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise. Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means.

Lightning victories, experience tells, store up evil consequences, usually for the victors.