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“The Devil’s Book: a three-foot-tall ancient book some believe the devil himself wrote. Yes, the real devil. Others think the book contains all the secrets of mesmerism.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“... The Devil’s Book.
The only book in the world she sees in her dreams, daydreams, and nightmares. The only book that may have the secrets of voice, the real ones, and not the boring jargon page after page that only tickles your curiosity and tells you the things you already know.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“Not that she needs to mesmerize anyone in particular. She only needs to stop stuttering while her new family stares at her.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I'm sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I'm some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Fermata

“Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had never been able to discover. All I knew was that the feeling had been with me since the morning I woke up and found myself in Venice.”
― Melika Dannese Lux, Corcitura

“For every wizened female tortoise there's a male tortoise who thinks she's irresistible.”
― Jill Mansell, Maybe This Time

“I don't know that he said a thing. He smelled strange, I noticed that right away, not rotten like you and Roticella said, more complicated, like an apple that the wasps are flying around, musty, but autumny... I can't explain. But he hissed, and those awful red eyes, like red fire, coals. God, they were anything but dead the way they are in his picture. I could see the iris was dark brown, almost black, and the whites were bloodshot lines... The lashes were thick and Harry I just can't say this right, but the eyes, they weren't repulsive. Evil, evil, but not to turn you away. I... I couldn't stop looking at him. It was like some sort of spider sucking out all my juices. Destroying me right there on the sidewalk.

'And I felt I was going to faint, and I tried, I tried to break out of that stare of his, but I couldn't. He was drawing everything out of me - my job, that you were trying to trap him, even things about me, even personal things. Then... then he was gone.

'I was conscious of myself again, it was like I had been left hollow, worthless. I mean something of me went with him and the rest of me wanted to go with him. I'm ashamed, Harry, so ashamed...' She sobbed for a moment, then with difficulty regained her control.”
― Leslie H. Whitten Jr., Progeny of the Adder

“That's enough Susy, nuff, nuff.'

'No, no I just want to say this,' she gasped, on the brink of incoherence. 'His eyes, his face, it's not ugly, and I know if I go back that he'll come and get some more of me... Even when he has drained all I know and when he... God, God, he came at me, at my throat and even then, I couldn't stop him, didn't want to even when I felt his mouth...'

She reached to her throat, where her hands fluttered. Her eyes, clear and cornflower blue when they had been so serene a few minutes ago, were stark and tormented. Suddenly she buckled toward him from her propped position, sobbing. He caught her and she wept into his chest.

'And the worst thing... the worst thing... is that I want to see him again... Harry, he wanted me to take that cross off, and I did, and I've felt him wanting me now, even now, with blessed Jesus over my bed.”
― Leslie H. Whitten Jr., Progeny of the Adder

“While trances had long been associated with biblical figures and medieval saints, American audiences of this era had become familiar with a new type of dream state, the mesmeric or hypnotic trance first noted by the eighteenth century Austrian doctor Friedrich Anton Mesmer.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married