SHOEBURYNESS (abs.n.) The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's bottom.

Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.

Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

It's good to leave your room super-messy when you're away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.

...they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.