“Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and reread until the cover was falling apart. There had been an all-black cover on the vampire book. This new one gleamed like polished chrome. It was called THE SHINING, but it cost $2.50 and he had spent all but $1.25 of his weekly allowance on some STAR WARS stuff at the mall.”

“The playboy is not necessarily a man who has many girlfriends, or a man who has many women, or a man who has slept with many women. That is old. But there is a new breed of the playboy and he is the man who remains single in attempts to make every woman feel as if he belongs to her, he remains a virgin in order to make every woman feel like she will be the first one, and in the end he may choose a very unattractive woman to adorn his side, so that in all circumstances, he will shine as the more beautiful one. This is the new breed of playboy. And it is a very evil one.”

“He that say madness isn't contagioushas never spent his whole childhood locked upin a room without doors or windows where the grown-upslie chained together in their straitjacketsafter having tried to scratch each others eyes out andday and night planned to tear each other apart”

“Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. "Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said.”

“He had wanted so hard to Escape, to find the stars. And all he had found was a new prison.”

“He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn't know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.”

“He loved her as he had never loved another, and he trusted her as he had allowed himself to trust no one else. But by the nature of the world, those who loved and trusted were uniquely vulnerable”