“These are the very worst aspects of the world’s infancy,” protested the Orchid as she was jostled by a brand-bearing cat-masked spring-footed Holy Electrician from a period which had prospered at least a million years before.

It has been suggested that his works raise the question of what is real, what is a real cowboy, and what makes it so.

When Fields walked into the room, he found the two women “pasting sequins one at a time in a coloring book,” an activity pursued after the age of seven only if a person is on speed.

Loving Joni is a little like falling into a cement mixer.

The protagonist, Sieg Warheit, is a Knight of the Dark Glyphs who is on a quest under command of the Order of St. Overia to find his former friend, Victor Delacroix, who has stolen the forbidden book “Apocrypha of Yzarc”, and to stop him from releasing the evil spirit Azrail, who would destroy the three planes of existence: the Nether World, the Middle World, and the Celestial World.

In an over-reaction, I created the Jane Austen spell-check dictionary for Glamour in Glass. Basically, I took the complete works of Jane Austen, ran it through an engine that created a list of unique words, which I then plugged in as a spell-check dictionary. It flag any word that she didn’t use. From there, I looked it up to see if the word a) existed in 1815 or b) had shifted meaning.

(from this interview with Mary Robinette Kowal)

Maybe this kind of thing is common and I just don’t know about it, but in any case it strikes me as a cool idea

There is a general mnemonic for remembering the effects of hypercalcaemia: “Stones, Bones, Groans, Thrones and Psychiatric Overtones”

It was Rokfrug.  He continued heavily: “If the ladies will excuse us, I’d like a middle-of-the-leg word with you, sediment-nostril.”

Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate of Dr. Evil has been created. Upon learning this, how seriously should he take the hypothesis that he himself is that duplicate? I answer: very seriously.

Although I haven’t worked out the math, intuitively this difference could be important if the universe is fundamentally unpredictable but our notion of error is insensitive to the unpredictable aspects.