“I know...but just the same" – this is Octave Mannoni's formulation of the structure of the fetish, and more generally of fetishistic thinking. The fetishist knows that an old, cherished belief is false but nonetheless continues to believe it. The nonetheless is not articulated, it is the fetish.”

“Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.”

“It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.”

“If we chose to refuse irony, we risk becoming irony's dupe.”

“However, in fetishism the desired object is displaced; and in this context (“The Apparition” by Guy De Maupassant) it is the desiring object, so to speak. In other words, have we ever seen a boot in love with a fetishist?”

“Are you telling me you think Ranger's a superhero?'Think about it. We don't know where he lives. We don't know anything about him.'Superheroes are make-believe.'Oh yeah?' Lula said. 'What about God?”

“If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to get me drunk," I said to Ranger. "Not drunk," Ranger said. "Just relaxed and naked.”