Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I may not be an orphan, but I've always been alone.”
Sabo Quotes
2 quotes from One Piece, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
“I want to see the world and write a book about it!”
Set beside a boy who wants to be King of the Pirates, wanting to travel and write a book sounds like a school essay. It is the most modest dream on the page, and that is the strongest case against it. The answer is on the page before it. Sabo's childhood, as he tells it, was lessons every single day under parents who wanted him fit to marry royalty, and one flashback panel has an adult telling him that if he has time to draw pictures he can go to his room and study. The book is what that education looks like when he gets to keep it. Navigation, he says in the same panel, is the one thing he likes to study, and he wants to be a pirate who writes. The dream does not reject the highland's schooling. It steals it. That is a sharper escape than the grand version, because it keeps the one part of the old life that was his and throws out the purpose it was meant to serve. The concession stands too: as a slogan it is small. It was never meant to be one. It was said in a forest by a boy who had admitted two pages earlier that his parents were alive.
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Explore One Piece in book form. Check the listing for the edition, language and volumes included. The source beside each quote records where its wording was checked; it may differ from the wording in this edition.
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The kingdom is introduced on page 12 as thought to be the most beautiful land of the East Blue, spotlessly clean, a successful example of a society where everything unnecessary is removed. Sabo's history, as he finally tells it, is that he was the unnecessary thing inside one of its good houses. His parents are alive; his father has just recognized him in the street and called him home. What the flashback shows is what home meant: lessons every single day, fights when he could not learn fast enough, a father who wants him worthy to marry a daughter of the royal family so that the family will be set. He was a nuisance in that house, he says. The line is the summary of that childhood, and it turns the word orphan inside out. Ace has to threaten to beat the truth out of him, and the truth is that he came to Trash Mountain with two parents and the same condition as the orphans he lived among. His father, in the flashback, calls the mountain's people trash in the shape of people, and his own measure at home, without a royal marriage, was no better than trash. He chose the place where the word was at least said to his face.