It's impossible to find happiness if you're an orphan."
"That's not true. Orphans are the only ones who are free to find their own happiness; they don't have their own history so they create it for themselves."
"But, Z, that's just an illusion. Their lives are determined for them by people who have no relation to them whatsoever -- total strangers dictate their future. They have no attachment to anything, they stumble around in the dark until one day something happens to set them on a different, random path. I don't call that freedom."
"But that's just what it's like for all of us!

Author: Tash Aw