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

“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.”

“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.”

“Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget or help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighborhood of light we see our own face.”

“Some people do not want to examine religious influences of child maltreatment. However, if we fail to look at all influences and risk factors, then we are allowing some forms of abuse to continue and, therefore, are guilty of maltreatment ourselves.”

“Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....”