There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

Chantal is having a relationship with a sentence. Just one of those things. A chance meeting that grew into something important for the both of them.

But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY. And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn't suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain.

For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out.