“She had a wild imagination, and sometimes she could fool herself.”

“Pia was blackmailed into committing a crime more suicidal than she could possibly have imagined, and she had no one to blame but herself.”

“She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure.”

“Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.”

“She had fooled herself into believing she was living the life she’d always dreamed of living when all she had been doing was hiding from it.”

“She could not bear the thought. She simply could not bear the thought that she might somehow prove to her grandfather that her mother had indeed been a fool and her father had been a damned fool and that she was the damnedest fool of them all.”