“He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.”

“He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.”

“The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face.It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more. And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it.”

“Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.”

“He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.**Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.”

“Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.”

“He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood an Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy's tits? asked a voice in his head).”