“Initiation. What he meant was hazing. [...] Bonding and brotherhood were always the excuses, but more often it was about humiliation and channeling sexual frustrations into perverse games of dominance.”

“To be the altar boy at the first Mass of the day was a sacred initiation rite. It was like being hazed at a fraternity, only more Catholic.”

“Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...”

“The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?”

“Sexual frustration' - it always sounds like the only frustrated ones are the ones who don't do it. What a laugh. The frustrated ones are the ones who do do it! The ones who don't can at least preserve some illusions.”

“If it were nothing but sexual attraction I’m sure I would not suffer such unbearable humiliation. But I wanted so much more than her body.”