“I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasn't shiny, no - shiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what I'm saying”

“Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.”

“Behind the desk was nothing but view-the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their towels packed with cheap, glittery watches and belts. That's how New York looked: like gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.”

“I wider that all the time - what will happen next" Kitty says. "sometimes, I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... Or what?”

“You can't tell. That's something I'm learning here in N.Y.C: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. They're not even two-faced--they're, like, multiple personalities.”

“It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.”

“I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.”