"She says, "I'll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me."Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us - just her supporting cast.Mrs. Clark, leading us, she looks back and says, "He what?"And from behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, "Me, too. He raped me first."Saint Gut-Free says, "Well what the hell...He poked me, too."As if poor skinny Saint Gut-Free had enough ass left to poke.And Mrs. Clark says, "This is not funny. Not in the least.""Tough," the Matchmaker tells her. "It's wasn't funny, either, when you raped me."Shaking his ponytail, the Duke of Vandals tells the Matchmaker, "You couldn't pay to get raped."

"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."

"For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions."

"If you never been rabid, you ain't never lived."

"Find out what you're afraid of and go live there."

"Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends."

"Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you."

"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."

"History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse."

"And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

"After you find out all the things that can go wrong, you life becomes less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia. Every look in a mirror, you scan for the red rash that means shingles. See also: Ringworm. See also: Lyme disease, meningitis, rheumatic fever, syphilis."

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart."

"Rachel hadn't invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis, she'd gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn't crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders."

"He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover."

"You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be."

"When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke."

"I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's about getting off."

"Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit."

"If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel.And if you never have sex, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule."

"My stomach hurts, but if it's guilt or impacted stool, I can't tell. Either way, I'm so full of shit."

"Masochism is a valuable job skill."

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?"

"Believe in me and you shall die, forever."

"A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."

"A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music."

"Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."

"Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."

"Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping."

"We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces."

"I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm."

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

"It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe."

"The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

"You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world."

"You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.Only God has the right to surprise His children with death."

"And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people."

"Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them."

"Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours."

"Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it's up to us to create our own messiah. To save ourselves."

"Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless."

"A woman calls from Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She's sure of it. Now she's only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all heir luggage, and their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof. Bermuda triangulated."

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?"

"Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping."

"Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine."

"There are lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love."

"I am nothing, and not even that."

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!"

"We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior."