The man is positively Newtonian in his predictability, a boiling, narcissistic assault on the doctrine of free will.

No doubt the story of the stone is the greast novel in the world. 

Cao Xueqin is God.

(First two lines of a Goodreads comment I received today.  Redology sure is one intense fandom)

A recent article in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood measured the rates of violence in different genres of children’s entertainment.  The television programs had 4.8 violent scenes per hour; the nursery rhymes had 52.2.

Two unsupervised children are allowed to go on a dangerous errand; Jack sustains a head injury that could leave him with brain damage, while Jill’s condition is unknown.

They even cause all sorts of “crazy phenomenon” to occur: “pervert phenomenon’s,” “fire phenomenon,” “phenomenons of strangulation,” “organ crash phenomenon,” “immodest phenomenon,” and “upside down phenomenon.”

To the south, though, an overtly-theocratic Christian fundamentalist nation has evolved and plans to wage war against the San Franciscans.

The computers in this world are all-powerful and free of bugs – everyone is always writing code very fast, and the code almost always works, instantly solving whatever problems people face.

For now, prehistoric remains convey the distinct impression that The Past is a place where a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.

Thus for a while their eloquence was mute and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively by virtue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactile sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both. The visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that passion was active and action passive, they both being overcome by other and each the conqueror. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosm or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dial will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness and offensive to the purity of chaste ears; yet seeing she was to be his wife and that she could not be such without consummation of marriage, which signifieth the same thing in effect, it may be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced act be lawful, that the diction which supposes it can be of no great transgression, unless you would call it a solecism or that vice in grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine gender.

From The Jewel by Thomas Urquhart (1652).  Possibly “the first explicit sex scene in English literature” (h/t Ali on Goodreads, who in turn got in from the second volume of Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History)

So in this phrase the concept “reality” is seen to be a kind of compound of “physiological processes” and “monotony.”