“Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. "I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?”

“Well, Hae-Joo probed, what did I do to relax? I play Go against my sony, I said."To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?"The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve?So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.”

“How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?”

“Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?”

“Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.”

“Sobering to think how one accursed night of baccarat can alter a man's social standing so irreversibly.”

“Human life, Borges said, is a cascade of possible directions, and we take only one, or we perceive that we take only one—which is how novels are written, too. You start with a blank page, and the first word opens up possibilities for the second word. If your first word is Call, those second two or three could be a doctor or it could be me Ishmael. It could be Call girls on Saturday nights generally cost more than . . . The second sentence opens up a multitude of third sentences, and on we go through that denseness of choices taken and choices not taken, swinging our machetes.”