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This was what I knew Max didn't understand when he talked about not being able to provide for me financially at the rate I was used to; even if he'd been in a position to give me $1000, if he’d had a limitless family inheritance that I could draw from at will, it wouldn't be the same. That $1000, the submissive’s $1000, would still be there, glistening like raw meat in a bear trap.

And it never goes away. Doing sex work is like having a chip installed in your head that gives you money radar. Suddenly you see, everywhere you go, no matter what else you do, how much money men are willing to part with if you know what to offer them and are willing to offer it. I felt like I was collecting, not quite working. I was claiming what was already rightfully mine. So maybe the money wasn't the meat—maybe the money was the bear, and I the one who set the trap.

— Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane (Page 356)

The great delusion of men everywhere, that their disregard for other people makes them interesting.

— Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane (Page 199)

His black trousers fell away like husks from some late-blooming flower […].

— A Thief in the Nude by Olivia Waite (Rushmore Brothers, #1)

Sometimes I felt so greedy to talk to him, to tell him things about myself, but maybe that was because who else could I tell? My work is usually being present while someone else talks, and the response is better if I don't add anything of my own - which wouldn't be particularly intimate even if I did. Men think they want to hear it, but they don't, because it is Their Time. Those hours are supposed to be about my interest in them. Sometimes when I offer up a thought or anecdote, it's as if I farted. They pause, then change the subject entirely. Was what I called love really just misdirected relief at finding someone who would indulge my self-disclosures?

— Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane (Page 155)

If a man says he loves you, it's because he wants to control you. That's what I decided. No man says, "I love you so go be free. I expect nothing." Not in my experience, anyway. Every man since my father has loomed his love over me like a sentence.

— Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane (Page 122)

Placing fences around sex to separate it from the rest of your normal life makes it more intense, not safer. I've gotten to practice that rush so many times through work. Not always or even often. But for years, I've practiced parsing out what is real and enduring from what's artificially heightened.

Fucking outside a relationship has no plausible conclusion other than an end. Conventional romantic relationships end too but they usually flourish inside the hope that they won't, that something permanent is being built.

— Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane (Page 118)

We kissed and kept kissing even though his mouth is too much for me, plush and good, and I can't kiss. I try a little but then I stop because men's mouths are a changing puzzle I've had to solve almost every day for almost a decade and sometimes I just shut down, I hate it so much, I don't know how to respond to wanting to do it well. The next day I'd be off on a long date with an old man who leads with his hard, short tongue, his mouth open in a grimace around it, like an animal struggling to eat from a narrow jar.

— Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane (Page 91)