The cure for love ... was marvellously simple, necessitating only the realisation that you can have anything you desire, providing you don’t desire it too greatly. ... If Claudia could be brought to understand that, if she would sit quietly by her fire, bows and arrows out of sight, then sooner or later her prey would emerge from the undergrowth, unicorn-like, and lay his head in her lap, then ... much of the urgency would go from her longing.

Sylvie always jumped when the telephone rang, as though an unseen lunatic had suddenly screamed in her ear. Consequently whenever she picked it up she sounded slightly hostile.

Sylvie wondered what had happened to the permissive and loose-living young. All the ones she'd met recently were dauntingly moralistic. They ate Health Foods, and while, admittedly, they didn't get married much they paired off very early and stayed together for ages and ages. They made her feel immature, an axolotl.