A mystery is solved with a story.

Goodness! Golly! Good God! Blessed Allah! Zeus and Hera! Mary and Joseph! Nathaniel Hawthorne! Don't touch her! Grab her! Move closer! Run away! Don't move! Kill the snake! Leave it alone! Give it some food! Don't let it bite her! Lure the snake away! Here, snakey! Here, snakey snakey!

Sometimes words are not enough.

There is no worse sound in the world than someone who cannot play the violin but insists on doing so anyway.

It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.

The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.