How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
03-01 said, "Your mother advised you poorly. This is not to deny her considerable charms; but in future, you would be well advised to attend less carefully to her every word."
She protested, "He is my son."
"Let us say rather," said 03-01, "that he belongs to all of us." (1.2.34-36)
Yikes. So Mr. Gitney (or 03-01) basically tells Octavian not to listen to his mother. We bet that wouldn't fly with your mom, and it doesn't exactly fly with Cassiopeia either. No learning at mama's breast here… It's all about the men.
Quote #5
When I was five and was taught subtraction, 03-01 showed me how to weight the golden chamber-pot and subtract its weight to determine more easily how much I had passed in the day. By such lessons did I become acclimated to scientific calculation in even the meanest function, so learning the secrets of tare and gross. (1.7.6)
Here's all you need to know about this lesson in "scientific calculation": Octavian learns math from weighing his own crap. We're guessing that's not how you learned math.
Quote #6
I thought of those months—playing at her knees; or her telling me tales of the Governor's wife and lap-dog, the barking, the stains, the hullabaloo of servants; I considered the nights of my childhood when she sat by my side and stared down upon me; and I recalled that earliest image, standing with her while men burned bubbles in the orchard like the ignition of cherubim. Such as these, I had no doubt, were not extant in the volumes there, slipped between the quantification of my appetites; thus, I might read of the weight of peach cobbler I had eaten on a certain night when I was five, but not recall the blush of evening as I walked with her a half an hour later among the garden herbs. (1.11.34)
Hey, Mr. G may have all the digits on Octavian, but as Octavian points out, all that data isn't going to tell us or anyone else about what Octavian's experiences were like. That kind of information, dear Shmoopsters, is the stuff of literature, not science.