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The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. (—Buffo the Great)

She fell to genuflecting in front of the icon. She might have prayed for the soul of her daughter, the murderess, had she not been so weary she could do no more than perform the physical rituals of faith.

The figure engraved on this medallion was that of a (…) phallus, in the condition known in heraldry as *rampant*, and there were little wings attached to the ballocks thereof, which caught my eye immediately. Around the shaft of this virile member twined the stem of a rose whose bloom nestled somewhat coyly at the place where the foreskin folded back. Whether the thing was ancient or modern I could not tell (…)

But what I never could get used to was the sight of their eyes, for there was no terror in the house our customers did not bring with them.

Sealed in this artificial egg, this sarcophagus of beauty, I waited, I waited … although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did *not* await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my *appearance* for ever!

(…) the wind blew Big Ben, striking midnight, so lost, so lonely a sound it seemed to Walser the clock might be striking in a deserted city and they the only inhabitants left alive. Although he was not an imaginative man, even he was sensitive to that aghast time of the night when the dark dwarfs us.

(…) it was an old-fashioned house, so much so that, in those years, it had a way of seeming almost too modern for its own good, as the past so often does when it outruns the present.

(…) he was astonished to discover that it was the limitations of her act in themselves that made him briefly contemplate the unimaginable — that is, the absolute
suspension of disbelief.
For, in order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman — in the implausible event that such a thing existed — have to pretend she was an artificial one?

Now, wings without arms is *one* impossible thing; but wings *with* arms is the impossible made doubly unlikely — the impossible squared. Yes, sir!

For we are at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about to be ground out in the ashtray of history. It is the final, waning, season of the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine. And Fevvers has all the *éclat* of a new era about to take off.

You will notice that despite my hinting at my flaws I have never claimed to be talentless. I am actually quite talented, though not in a way that fits with contemporary capitalism. I would have made an excellent court joker and, I suspect, a decent bard. My worth is inconveniently misplaced.

I don't like crying in front of people, anyway. (…) Everyone always wants you to feel better, don't they? They can't sit comfortably in a room with your misery, it's like pins and needles for them. To be properly sad you either have to be alone or a little selfish. You have to not care whether your gloom dampens someone else's bright.

Some people have such verbosity of sadness, periods that lead to beautiful metamorphoses. That or they have a destructive form of sadness, little inner cyclones of it. Meanwhile I become something of a brick wall, or a used car. Less valuable each time I am injured.

I felt this, too, was a strange remark but I, unlike most people, am not opposed to strangeness. I am generally regarded as strange myself.

I suppose it was largely because she was a woman that I didn’t question whether or not she was a serial killer. That, or I was tired.

I generally find hunting stupid, given that it is a silly game played mostly by men who cannot find a clitoris, but on occasion I will concede it can be quite stimulating.

Time moves so differently when every day is part of a cycle.

I’m not sure what changed, exactly, just that Carl is losing patience with me and seems somehow more and less interested in what I'm up to, in that he wants to keep an eye on me but doesn't require insight as to why I do anything I do.

(…) I would never do what she does, fucking him with toys and such as if she is the man. Not because I dislike such things (I like to do the fucking on occasion because power suits me) but because afterward I would never be able to look at him without laughing. If I ever allowed myself to leave him keening desperately beneath me I would never be able to stop seeing him that way, and then how would I do any of this?

He knows where I’ve been within the walls of his castle, and he knows what I’ve touched. He doesn’t know what I’ve seen, though, and for all that he thinks he knows me, he doesn’t know who I am.

“To turn on a king is not bravery,” he corrects me. “To simply suffer an insult to one’s pride is not courage at all.”

[…] But you can have an orgasm on your own, okay? I'm serious. You do not need him. If he says you have talent it doesn't matter. The talent is yours. It's intrinsic to you. It can't be bestowed upon you by him and it never will be.

Theoretically it could be a woman who does this to you, (…). But statistically it is much more likely to be a man.

Someday a man will tell you he's never felt this way in his entire life, that it's different this time, that what you have is real and everything that came before you wasn't love, it was just treading water. He will make you feel special and for a minute your youth will seem incidental, like a forgettable side effect of fate, when actually the only reason you feel special at all is because you're so goddamn young. []

The absolute fuckery of it is that I don't get how people can say that money doesn't buy happiness. (…) You can't be happy without money, because in order to be happy you need choices, you need freedom, you need the ability to think and dream and wonder and you just simply cannot do that if you spend all day and night thinking about how you'll pay your next bill.

[…] A demon is more like a personification or a vessel, a sentience of hunger. So, what do you do with the hungry? Ignore them, if you're the government. But if you care about keeping demons off your lawn in a meaningful, permanent way, then you can just feed them instead.

Here is what nobody told Chrissy before that night:
You can't kill a demon because demons aren't alive in a way that makes sense. You can't kill a demon any more than you can kill a black hole or drive a wooden stake into the concept of monogamy. What you can do with a demon is contain the damage, or rather, slake its appetite. […]

Just think of it like social work okay, secure your own mask before assisting others. And then just don’t assist others.

She lets him see 92 percent of her selves, all of the good ones and some of the worst ones (he is polite enough to think the rotting scales a phase rather than a form) but still leaving one or two miscellaneous for herself. Alone, filled with echoes, a cave to hold her secrets, not her best her or her worst her, but still her, nonetheless.

And in that moment, perhaps it seems worth it to be alive again, to know that this love is not only possible but within my grasp. For what reason should I crave the whispers of a tomb when life can beam so shiningly, with such warmth?

She wants me to stay alive and so I am alive. I do not understand what is so difficult about any of this except that it is nearly impossible to bear.