If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.

Outside Styx’s apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and...

I’m beginning to think you’re the sort of person who does a great deal with very little.”He meant a liar.

She looked around at the close confines of the NCD offices. They were cramped and untidy. No. They were worse than that. They had gone through cramped and untidy, paused briefly at small and shabby...

I’ve managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years,” she announced with some small sense of achievement. “I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still...

…Negligible Senescence…

There’s more to good or bad than what’s written in the Rulebook.

The front room of his house was what I called ‘untidy chic’. Prefects weren’t subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness...

Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.

Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are general disappointed when they figure it out.

I liked him, but since his particular field of interest was Remote Suggestion–the skill of projecting thoughts into people’s heads from a distance–I didn’t know whether I actually liked him or he was just suggesting...

…the known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow.

I shouldn’t believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.

My father said it was a delightfully odd – and dangerously self-destructive – quirk of humans that we were far more interested in pointless trivia then in genuine news stories.

The best lies to tell,” said Jane, “are the ones people want to believe.

She opened the door within two seconds of his pressing the doorbell, letting out a stream of cats that ran around with such rapidity and randomness of motion that they assumed a liquid state of...

Religion isn’t the cause of wars, it’s the excuse.

Rouge of my heart, intertwined with double-hued destiny,Thread of my thoughts, constant and rubicund legacy,Filament of my future, endeared unto my expectation,Cord of my emotion, seared with eternal elation.

Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.

I wasn’t particularly worried; running is overrated anyway, and sport only makes you sweaty and smug and wears out the knees.

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It’s the crack cocaine of the...

People don’t change just because you know more about them.

Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.

Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth’s funerals. She missed everything…except the blame. It was waiting...

I didn’t set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often...

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge...

The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.

Books” – Snell smiled – “are a kind of magic.

You’re talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I’m talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever.

She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild...

…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?What do you mean, odd?’Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.

Männliches Schuldverweigerungs-Syndrom”, erklärte mein Vater. “Von 2054 an ist das eine medizinisch anerkannte Krankheit.

Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just … well, differently moraled, that’s all.

They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands; the air was heav’y with th’em&.

The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable.

Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn”t what it used to be?

Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth...

Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it.

Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.

I don’t need you to agree with me,” she said quietly.” I’ll go away happy with a little bit of doubt. Doubt is good. It’s an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed...

Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.

Chromatacia…society…ruled by a colortocracy…social hierarchy based upon one’s limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane...

She wasn’t the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe....

If it weren’t for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.

magic swirls about us like an invisible fog of energy that can be tapped by those gifted enough, using a variety of techniques that center on layered spelling, mumbled incantations, and a burst of concentrated...

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

I was in ’78 recently,” he announced. “I brought you this.”He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn’t recognize the title.”Didn’t they split in ’70?””Not always. How are things?

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

You’re just a huge romantic at heart, aren’t you?””If there’s cash involved, I’m anything you want me to be.