Quotes About Intrigue

Shirlee opened the teak doors and ushered me in. A thickset man, 40s, swarthy, unshaven, in a loose v-neck t-shirt and carefully

they are mystified by certain instances.

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand, Which, to admire, we should not understand

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.

He had a face like a nutcracker; a scrawny man of no particular age, with merry secretive eyes.

Money? in a voice that rustled.

Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust it's own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink it's teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next.

To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .

He robbed a bank in Wichita.

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

No idea. None whatever. That's exactly what makes it so interesting.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.

His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September.

He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. "Bein' followed, you." Far off, down in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.

A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale. Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer.

Aubrey Beardsley.

Her four pupils bored into his, her white face perfectly immobile. "Altruism? What's happening to you?" "I don't know," he said.

Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates.

Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.

Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.

With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.