This is a very grave matter, punishable by...well, I do not exactly know what, but something rather severe, I should imagine.

For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.

When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. "This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said. "My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!

He had once found himself in a room with Lady Bessborough's long-haired white cat. He happened to be dressed in an immaculate black coat and trousers, and was there thoroughly alarmed by the cat's stalking round and round and making motions as if it proposed to sit upon him. He waited until he believed himself to be unobserved, then he picked it up, opened a window, and tossed it out. Despite falling three storeys to the ground, the cat survived, but one of its legs was never quite right afterward and it always evinced the greatest dislike of gentlemen in black clothes.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.