“Before she could look to find a wound he had control of the vision once again, but like a juggler attempting to hold too many balls in the air catching one meant loosing another.”

“Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.”

“Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.”

“..She had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon.”

“Help me', he said, like a lost child.Go to Hell, the room respectfully replied; and for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what that meant.”

“And to think, she'd once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism.”

“The World. Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will's presence, was made by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few; to find a place in which you could change the repetitive patterns of the many Through political influence and intellectual discourse, and failing either of these , through benign coercion.”