“Worst of all, she expected him to kiss her. A lot. God, the amount of time the woman spent slobbering all over him when they were performing the act made him feel like his face was crawling with germs. What was it with women and kissing anyway?”
“taking your son to a whorehouse, thought”
“Anyone with any smarts at all realized New Orleans was a cesspool of nefarious activities.”
“According to the FBI, hundreds of thousands of children”
“men she would soon be assisting would never accept her as the person in charge if she was less than perfect in her role, which meant she must become fully polished. She needed to gain their trust and allegiance if she hoped to find a way to take them down along with Antoine. She had to look, talk, and act like one of their class.”
“Many times each day she felt herself close to slipping into despondency, feeling she was no closer to her goal. It could take years! Those were years where she should have been having fun, dating, learning to love. Instead, all she felt was hate. Even though it still could be a few”
“men were incredibly frustrated because they could never book a night with her, but at the same time her unavailability made her even more desirable. To be blessed with a smile or a wink from Angel was to walk among the heavens for several minutes. She had the unique capability of making each man she gave even the slightest attention to feel as though he”
“egos would convince them all those hours of seduction had been spent with their dick firmly planted in one opening or another. Even though it usually wouldn’t be so, it was necessary for them to think it, especially if Rêve was to garner repeat all-night reservations.”
“finding it hard to stay away from Rêve for any length of time. Amy was in his mind constantly. Whenever he visited the schools in his jurisdiction, he salivated over the thirteen and fourteen-year-old girls he saw parading the halls. They wanted to be so worldly, trying out make-up and too adult-looking clothes,”
“You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."
"What about Rwanda?"
"Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere.”
“It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts... and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody's apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam.”
“Try repeating “man is an animal" a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds. There seems to be no way to get this idea into our heads, except by long rumination over the facts of evolution or perhaps by exposure to a primitive tribe or by being raised on a farm. Primitives sometimes see little difference between themselves and the animals around them. Karl von den Steinen was told by a Xingu that the only difference between them and the monkey was that they monkeys lacked the bow and arrow. And Jules Henry observed on the Kningang that dogs are not considered pets, like some of the other animals, but are on a level of emotional equality, like a relative. But in our own Western culture we have, for the most part, set a great distance between ourselves and the rest of nature, and language helps us to do this. Thus we say that a sheep “drops" its lamb, but a woman “gives birth"—it’s much more noble. Yet we have the right to make such distinctions because we assign the meaning to the world by naming names of things; we inhabit a different sphere and we capitalize naturally on the privilege.”
“After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin's newspaper.”
“I would think you an utter fool if you did not doubt me, warrior. Instead, I am forced to respect your uncommon intelligence. Now what, do you suppose, should I do from there?”
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