“He said he was - this is exactly what he said - he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son', and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you - that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! I could just spit! I could! It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something…”

“Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’retaking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then heheaded toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.“I kind of like them.”“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to movemore gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.”

“There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!" But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.”

“You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,” he said, his glasses flashing from the early night’s light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.“You know what I mean, Tom?” he asked. “It’s just not.”

“He looked down at his empty glass. "One of the other ways in which I am different from my father," he said. "I am not interested in marrying where I do not love."I spoke in a jesting voice. "And of all the women in the eight provinces, you have not been able to find one you could love?"Now he looked at me again, and his face was completely serious. "That's the problem," he said. "There is one.”

“He's putting a lot of cards down on the table," Trey said thoughtfully, taking a step forward. "And Matthias is never one to share something for free if he could charge for it.""And you're not normally one to think for himself," Matthias said pleasantly. "I suppose we're all growing as people.”