“Up ahead stands the fun house, which you enter through a clown’s smiling mouth.“I would kill myself if I was prisoner here,” Shelby says.“No, you wouldn’t, just out of courtesy,” I say, “because your body would be trapped in there after you die, and your friends would have to watch your corpse rot.”“Hmm,” Shelby says. “Smell it too.”“Well, now we’re looking on the bright side,” Packard says.”

“If you were M. Pujol, Madeleine says, I would reach out my hand to you. Like this.If you were M. Pujol, Adrien says, I would press my mouth against your pulse. Like this. If you were he, she says, I would cup your chin in my fingers.If you were he, he says, I would take those fingers into my mouth.Then my mouth would envy my fingers, she says.Then your mouth must usurp your fingers, he says.And then, she says, I would do this.”

“But we're not sleeping," he points out."well, I would be," I say, "if you would let me off the phone." Which is obviously a lie."Fine," he says."Fine," I say."Wait!""What now?!""Court?"I don't say anything."Are you there?""Yes, I'm here," I say, "What is it?""I love you." And then he hangs up the phone.”

“What do you say to em?Say to them?Yeah. Say.Hell, say anything. It doesnt matter, they dont listen. Well you gotta say somethin. What do you say?Try the direct approach.What's that?Well, like this friend of mine. Went up to this girl and said I sure would like to have a little pussy. No shit? What'd she say?She said I would too. Mine's as big as your hat.”

“I didn't say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don't have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that your can do is to have me killed.”

“I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me – my neck, say, or my knee – and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.”