“None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.”

“None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.”

“She was not sure if she would want him to have known; we do not always wish for those for whom we long to know that we long for them, especially if the longing is impossible, or inappropriate. . . to be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with.”

“For each of us, she thought, there is out completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding is a matter of moral luck.”

“We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy.”

“We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.”

“Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the game that we see for ourselves is large enough.”