RICK: How do you know his age? That he's blond and virile, with a socio-economic background?

Fieldbinder smiled coolly and speculatively stroked his own generous jaw, lingering over the deep cleft that somehow through physical processes obscure caught and reflected light in such a way as to blind anyone who tried to look directly into Fieldbinder's deep green eyes

_deep blue eyes, the color of cold crystal, with tiny fluffy white diamonds frozen in irises of ice.

_Fieldbinder grinned wryly. "The word has a music, in my opinion, is all."

[...] "Not infection rising from within, but injury punched into the tired envelope from without," "the skin no longer a viable boundary," and so on. He had not said membrane, to Lenore's knowledge.

[...] Am invited by Rex Metalman to a cotillion for his daughter, Melinda Susan Metalman. (Was it a real cotillion? Why can't I remember?) Am invited by Rex Metalman to some Puberty-Rite function for his daughter.

But dancing was of course out of the question, and this girl in the throes of Rite of course either danced or installed herself in a social orbit around the hors d'oeuvre bar, and I will never ever again approach a female at a hors d'oeuvre bar.

"[...] Even when it got real cool out on the porch of the place she'd wait, it turned out. She just kept looking at my Daddy like she didn't see what the problem was, this was just her life now, here, didn't we know it? While all the while we just stood around feeling terrible. [...]"

[...] there was nothing the pathetic, paralyzed, helpless dentist could do about it; he was as inefficacious as he was inadequate."

"Jesus, Rick, what is this?"

"I promise we'll be able to relate to it. Let's just bear with. [...] she begins to offer less and less resistance to the malevolent blond psychologist's frequent and oafish sexual advances, many of them made right there in the dentist's hospital room, while the dentist lies right there, helpless and insensate."

"Blond? A blond psychologist?"

"Affirmative."

"Why is this story beginning to give me the creeps?"

"It means you're beginning to relate. You're being intuitive about it."

Fieldbinder grinned coolly, then wryly.

"[...] stays shacked up in the malevolent blond psychologist's apartment, rutting, and also watching gymnastics on television, the symbolism of which doesn't escape the reader, rest assured."

"Lenore, we will shrink into husks together. We will bleed in the sky. See it?"

[...]

"We'll be joined in the light of the sky, Lenore. See the light of the sky? The dawn and sunset will be fed from our veins. We'll be spread all over. We'll be everything. We'll be gigantic."