“...but what I am not interested in, Ms. Clipboard- or Mr. Canker or Mrs. Murmur or Call-me-Carol, all of you- is your questions; even your pointing and tipping Enoch pencils have six sides, my dear definers: pay heed whereon you pinch!; I am interested, almost exclusively, in being interested, and your reductivist probings are only intended to cordon off wings of my mansion;”

“[...]my memory is reasonably good—unlike yours, dear sir!”“Mine is erratic,” he said imperturbably. “I remember only what interests me.”

“Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?”

“And now, O kind-hearted reader, I feel myself constrained, in the telling of this little story, to depart altogether from the principles of story telling to which you probably have become accustomed and to put the horse of my romance before the cart. There is a mystery respecting Mr and Mrs Peacocke which, according to all laws recognised in such matters, ought not to be elucidated till, let us say, the last chapter but two, so that your interest should be maintained almost to the end, -- so near the end that there should be left only space for those little arrangements which are necessary for the well-being, or perhaps for the evil-being, of our personages. It is my purpose to disclose the mystery at once, and to ask you to look for your interest, -- should you choose to go on with my chronicle, -- simply in the conduct of my persons, during this disclosure, to others. You are to know it all before the Doctor or the Bishop, -- before Mrs. Wortle or the Hon Mrs Stantiloup, or Lady De Lawle. You are to know it all before the Peacockes become aware that it must necessarily be disclosed to any one. It may be that when I shall have once told the mystery there will no longer be any room for interest in the tale to you. That there are many such readers of novels I know. I doubt whether the greater number be not such. I am far from saying that the kind of interest of which I am speaking – and of which I intend to deprive myself, -- is not the most natural and the most efficacious. What would the ‘Black Dwarf’ be if every one knew from the beginning that he was a rich man and a baronet? – or ‘The Pirate,’ if all the truth about Norna of the Fitful-head had been told in the first chapter? Therefore, put the book down if the revelation of some future secret be necessary for your enjoyment. Our mystery is going to be revealed in the next paragraph, -- in the next half-dozen words. Mr and Mrs Peacocke were not man and wife.”

“If a beautiful women expressed interest in me and my company, I don't really probe their motivations. Call me shallow. ”

“I'm not a man. I have no male pride for you to trick me with, and I am not interested in single combat. That is entirely a weakness of your sex, not mine. I am a woman. I will use any weapon and all weapons to get what I want.”