Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.

The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.