“'A man can only take so much pretty walking back and forth in front of him.' He said pretty like he meant something else.”

“This is shitty to say, but there's not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There's about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really got to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that.”

“How disposable is a woman's life? How expected. How unsurprising. How normal. How many times a week, a month, a year does that happen?”

“Sometimes she felt she had fallen asleep inside herself while she was wide awake working.”

“Well, draw yourself a pretty little blueprint and do me a favor and don’t show it to me. I like fighting, and I like fucking. I don’t care much for thinking.”

“And I realized something I never had before. Deep down, I want to be seen as an object too. I want to be coveted and sought after. I want to be taken apart and understood, reassembled, filed away in Didier's cabinet. I don't even need to be pretty to have this. I only have to allow him to open me up.”

“Even for the very clever it can be like breaking bones to stand back from something that’s been in front of you all your life.”