"Yelena, you've driven me crazy. You've caused me considerable trouble and I've contemplated ending your life twice since I've known you." Valek's warm breath in my ear sent a shiver down my spine."But you’ve slipped under my skin, invaded my blood and seized my heart.”“That sounds more like a poison than a person,” was all I could say. His confession had both shocked and thrilled me.“Exactly,” Valek replied. “You have poisoned me."

"Thus use your frog...Put your hook through his mouth, and out at his gills;...and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your hook;…"

"If he suddenly falls in love with someone else, a husband may not start wanting a divorce; but if he suddenly makes a lot of money, he usually will."

"For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultu…"

"I look so totally artificial, but I’ve always been the simplest person in the world."