“If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.”

“Ferret took out a folded scrap of paper and passed it to him.'My guy Ben doesn't know where the other club is, but the girls are being shipped in from here, a rehab centre in Newtonville.''What's this other place called?' Tazeem asked as he slipped the scrap of paper into his pocket.'The place is just known as The Club. But the behind-the-scenes bit that only the real big spenders get to see, there's no official name, 'cause officially it doesn't exist, that's know as The Zombie Room.”

“Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life's ironies too many times.”

“Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed.”

“You cannot!' Tatiana said sharply. 'If you order a gun there is only a single shot, and once delivered the doors are locked and will not open until it has been fired.”

“Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards.”

“Decker smiled and shrugged off their laughter. The humour was only barbed if you sat on the outside, and now he was one of them.”