"One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets."

"1801 - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."

"Han Fei-tzu sat in lotus position on the bare wooden floor beside his wife's sickbed."

"Si Wang-mu stepped forward."

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more."

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia."

"On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes."

"Rooter was at once the most difficult and the most helpful of the pequeninos."

"The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, 'Andrew, I suppose by now you're just absolutely sick of having that horrid monitor.'"

"Poke kept her eyes open all the time."

"Nothing looked right in Armenia when Petra Arkanian returned home."

"Bean kind of liked being tall, even though it was going to kill him."

"Han Tzu waited until the armored car was completely out of sight before he ventured out into the bicycle-and-pedestrian packed street."

"The house looked strange."

"If you're reading this, it must be a thousand years from now."

"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."

"We called him the Professor."

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia."

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

"The great Stephen King once wrote don't sweat the small stuff, which I mulled over for long enough to realize that I don't entirely agree with it."

"'So you're all set for money then?' the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice."

"After him!"

"I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect - and tax - public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure."

"Her entire honeymoon gave her hot and cold shivers."