“The first intimation I had that things were about to hot up was a pained and disapproving cough from the neighbourhood of the carpet.”

“But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.”

“The higher up I hold it, the less painful the hot wax.”…“Try hanging off the ceiling and dropping it from there.”

“I had a feeling that Ben Lancaster had just tattooed himself onto my soul and the thing about tattoos? They were painful to remove.”

“What about volcanoes?""What about them?""All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true.”

“Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it while it remains unmoved. You had to be the centre of the seesaw so the pain flowed through you, not into you. It was very hard. But she could do it!”