I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.

Elizabeth's voice had a door in it. When you opened that door you found another door, and that door opened yet another door. All the doors were nice and led out of her.

Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty words to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armor and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit woods where he vanished forever.

I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.

There was something dead in my heart. I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse. I had a dead mouse in my heart.

Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.