Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.")

When people say "clearly" something that means there's a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren't clear at all.

The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

This is Morbidia," said Vlad. "Although she's been calling herself Tracy lately, to be cool.

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.That would do it every time.

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.