Elle Lothlorien

“I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for 'I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek' to replace the rather nebulous term 'exploratory bite.”

“Alice, winning means manipulation. It means taking people—people who may have helped you in the past, even people you care about—and using them without hesitation or regret. It means making decisions that would be viewed by any normal-thinking human being as cynical at best and dishonorable at worst”

“Oh, I have plenty of problems with Rabbit, it’s just that my comfort level with his name is standing in line behind about a hundred more important things.”

“Did the Ancient Greeks ever write anything funny—like slapstick? I mean, I think I speak for everyone when I say that there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of well-written physical comedy.”

“Basic economic theory. People behave differently based on how much they think something’s worth. Because everyone got their chips for free, people made huge bets on every hand—no matter what they were holding. People who play with everything on the line—for real—don’t act like that.”

“You can pay for whatever you want, but I just want to warn you that I prefer to stay at places that don’t start or end with the word ‘motel.”

“Right, 'the Queen of Hearts.' Sounds to me like you’re just one bitch in a whole pack of cards, baby.”

“Well, you played me, Rabbit. You played me, and it worked, and I’m not the kind of person to make the same mistake twice. Your whole life is a game, but you know what? I already have a life. Poker’s nothing to me but a goddamn deck of cards.”

“Do you really think I’d let him call my sister a ‘bitch?’ Or you for that matter? Talon Hawk’s dumb, but he’s smarter than that…he’d be crawling around on his hands and knees picking his teeth off the tiles.”

“Locals. They’ll eventually get out. They’re annoyed. Like when Americans go to the lake. And it’s closed. ‘Cause some kid pooped in the water.”

“I am commanding you, as an older and wiser brother, to get over here, get on this caterpillar, and ride to the top of this mushroom with me.”

“I look around briefly at the other players like I always do before a game. Other than Queenie, Bill, and Talon, I don’t know any of them (and I don’t care enough about them to know them). But if there’s going to be any cordiality, any forced politeness or ‘Aw, shucks, let’s all just try to have a good time here tonight’ kind of blather, then now’s the time to get it out of the way before I get down to the business of screwing everyone out of their hopes and dreams.”

“Alice, it took big, dumb Talon Dodo thirty seconds to get you so pissed about a poker hand pun that you were about to beat him to death with your cane.”

“For someone named Alice, you’re really not all that up on your Wonderland trivia.”

“You can donate marrow for her, Alice Faye, you can’t cure her. You can win a poker tournament, but that won’t make her want to live. So I’ll ask you again: Who are you, and what are you doing here? Because Munny sure doesn’t want you to be her, and she wants someone to be out in the world living since she’s got the market cornered on dying right now.”

“Suddenly, the giant, three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the Underworld appears next to her—sans two of its heads—and sits down. As a child, we had a neighbor with a Great Dane, and I know they’re about three feet tall at the shoulder. Allow another twelve inches for their T-Rex-sized heads, and you’ve got a dog that this woman could throw a saddle on and ride like a pony.”

“The line from Pulp Fiction—the one Samuel L. Jackson shouts at John Travolta as they’re trying to wash blood off their hands—pops into my head: 'I used the same soap you did and when I dried my hands, the towel didn't look like no fuckin’ maxi-pad!' I almost—almost—share this most quotable of cinematic quotes with him, when I remember it contains The Word. You know: 'maxi-pad.”

“Would you like to hear about the fascinating things lizards can do if you chew off their tails?”

“I think I can say with confidence that it’s a lot funnier if you haven’t actually been attacked by a shark.”

“. I’ve watched about a dozen tourists almost get hit by cars since I’ve been here. I barely made it to the beach alive the other day. I mean, no one knows what they’re doing. They swing their heads back and forth like they’re mounted on a door hinge, but they don’t even know what they’re looking for, not really. Cars just come at you from all sorts of unnecessary directions here, and we’re all probably going to get killed.”