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Even if the criminal punishment system were free of racism, classism, sexism, and other isms, it would not be capable of effectively addressing harm. For example, if we want to reduce (or end) sexual and gendered violence, putting a few perpetrators in prison does little to stop the many other perpetrators. It does nothing to change a culture that makes this harm imaginable, to hold the individual perpetrator accountable, to support their transformation, or to meet the needs of the survivors.

— We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, Tamara K. Nopper, Naomi Murakawa (Page 3)

When asked, as in Derek Walcott's poem, "Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where your tribal memory?" my characters answer as in that poem, "Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / has locked them up." My characters can only tear into pieces, both history and Jefferys' observations, they can only deliberately misplace directions and misread observations. They can take north for south, west for east. Anywhere they live is remote. They can in the end impugn the whole theory of directions. They inhabit everywhere, mostly the metropoles of North America and Europe. Their lives take any direction at any moment.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 203)

On a Chart of The Antilles, or Charibbee, or, Caribs Islands with the Virgin Isles by Louis De La Rochette, drawn and published in 1784, there are angels, or cherubs, mouths pursed, blowing the trade winds west on the Atlantic. You must remember this is one point of the middle passage. People are to be lost here, drowned here; people are to be sold, backs and hearts broken; those cherubs, their sweet lips pursed, blow a rough trade. Only an artist could render an angel here. Wonderful wind roses adorn these maps, ships under full sail; cartouches of sovereigns, great explorers, and welcoming nubile natives.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 200)

What matters is not how many Israelis support the two-state solution—many of them do—but how they regard Greater Jerusalem, Qiryat Arba, and Ariel and the Jordan Valley. The vast majority regards this as a part of a Jewish state in a two-state solution. And in such a scenario nothing is left for the other state and what they mean is a support for a one-state version in which Zionism continues to prevail as a racist ideology or if convinced they would eventually accept a different democratic basis for such a state.

— On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé (Page 114)

I stepped into the cool opening of the Door of No Return. My feet landed where my thoughts were. This is the trick of the door—to step through and be where you want to be. Our ancestors were bewildered because they had a sense of origins—some country, some village, some family where they belonged and from which they were rent. We, on the other hand, have no such immediate sense of belonging, only of drift.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 118)

When you embark on a journey, you have already arrived. The world you are going to is already in your head. You have already walked in it, eaten in it; you have already made friends; a lover is already waiting.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 115)

So much goes on in this city. Somewhere among its millions of people someone is sitting in a four-foot-square box and thinking about an older city, thinking, "They build a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization." He is shaking his head at his own predicament and laughing to himself. Someone else is walking toward a theatre, a concert hall, with the cadence of Neruda's letter in her head, and a joke from the man from the oldest city in the world. Somehow she is comforted by this joke, somehow it helps her make it across the street and into the concert hall, it makes her walk to the podium and read Neruda's letter with all the more certainty that there's a country with an old city and a letter.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 110)

It is 4:45 a.m. I am doing what I do every time I drink too much wine and wake up suddenly at 4:45 a.m. I read. Eduardo Galeano falls open at this time: "I'm nostalgic for a country which doesn't yet exist on a map. Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is misled when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo. But if it were a country where you were my compatriot, then I would reconsider. And think of the things we should have to sort out.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 85)

As I've said before, states have no inherent legitimacy. They have all been imposed by violence, they are causing violence all over the world. It's an inhuman social structure. It should erode every time. In that context I think you could imagine an authentic return. Not just recognition of an historical wrong, but in fact interactions among people that are not based on states or religious or ethnic lines. There are other grounds for people to interact with one another.

— On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé (Page 67 - 68)

In 1999 a ship carrying children, teenagers, from China was apprehended off the coast of British Columbia. Newspapers and televisions referred to them as "migrants" and migrants they no doubt were, but one cannot help reading the exclusion of these "migrants" from the category of "children," which would make it possible to include them in a definition of family reserved for the people within the nation. All the accoutrement of outsider could then be brought to regulate and choreograph their appearance both on the television screens and in newspaper photographs as well as the interior of the body politic.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 65)

Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent. Country, nation, these concepts are of course deeply indebted to origins, family, tradition, home. Nation-states are configurations of origins exclusionary power structures which have legitimacy based solely on conquest and acquisition. Here at home, in Canada, we are all implicated in this sense of origins. It is a manufactured origin nevertheless playing to our need for home, however tyrannical. This country, in the main a country of immigrants, is always redefining origins, jockeying and smarming for degrees of belonging. Erasing aspects of complicated origins by shedding accents, shedding dress, shedding tastes, shedding tyrannies taking on other aspects of other complicated origins no matter the new tyrannies. Entry into nation and therefore home pervades the public discourse.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 64 - 65)