"Truth is, my wealth is psychological as well as moneyed, and, in order to spare you some crushing verbiage, I’ll ask you to witness my cruel-in-quotes decision for yourself and trust me when I say the bitch just simply had to die."

"Point is, I’m complicated, or, rather, there’s a strangely wending path between what I intend to say and what I gather I am thinking. I’ve always been this jumbled, even when my speech patterns employed a smaller engine and I thought about my weirdness in highly critical ways."

"I’m also like a child who’s just debarked a carousel and feels himself still spinning, even though he’s in the line to ride a roller coaster.”

"Truth is, Serge’s body, albeit mostly guesswork and packaging-related magic at that stage, had been gnawing—well, to be more honest, being gnawed at in absentia—long before my hunches were corroborated by a certain family photo of Serge et al. reclining on the beach, which I only didn’t mention when I was standing on the stairs because erections make me fumbly."

"If Serge had died before we reached the streets of Paris, I would have more than compensated with his slack-jawed shell. To speak somewhat frankly, every boy I’ve known as well as killed has struck me as his corpse’s baby picture."

"You who’ve read this far with any care and feel you know me to the point to which you’ve been empowered will have gleaned what I would like you to assume I felt when told my recent life had been the colophon of someone else’s trail of bread crumbs."

"“I find myself wondering,” I said, “if there are manga lovers like yourself whose fondest wish is not to wind up thin enough to mark a book but rather torn or hacked into pieces small enough to slide down someone’s throat.”"

"Meanwhile, an older man no more suited to the task of heating porn than the adolescent played the uninvited guest whose love of fucking little boys gives kiddie porn its dubious je ne sais quoi and brings the rare intellectual to its defense."

"“All I ask as recompense is that you consider me the vague beginnings of a friend. Truth is, while a life of tragedies and sexual abuse has hollowed me into a disbeliever in the scuttlebutt concerning love, there is, in addition to your total foxiness, a lack of something or other about your personage that I find sympathetic.”"

"François was, to generalize, a kind of sex-crazed doppelganger of those crackpots in America who can’t watch plates leave a waiter’s hands without proclaiming that, if not for a government cover-up, they would have been UFOs."

"It was then I understood the marbled swarm was not the act of terrorism I’d imagined but instead a method or procedure to keep the world intact, altered not one physical iota, while talking oneself into believing words alone could customize it."

"Barring my loft’s lack of proscenium and rows of seats, and given that the sun or lamps in my vicinity weren’t roving spotlights to my knowledge, I was and had been acting for as long as I could tell the difference."

"Maybe I warrant your indulgence as I stared into my future on that scattered afternoon, reenvisioning my father as an artist who couldn’t squint into a dent without creating a black hole, and Alfonse and I as sons who’d never masturbated without gluing down a piece of his collage, and the playhouse as a theater where I, the most anointed of his fantasies, could become the actor I’d been groomed to play."

"As I’ve mentioned, having sex is always new to me, and I am less its star than an inspector who assigns himself the case, and who is not so much assigned as stranded there, and every bed is like an open road, and I some clueless rabbit lingering in danger’s path because it needs the warmth."

"This is why I crawl in beds mythologized, and why I’m forcibly removed from them, then slump in taxis crumpling paper scraps not scribbled with new boyfriends’ numbers and addresses but inscribed with book titles like Outliving Your Depression or referrals to their friends who also happen to be psychiatrists."