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Generic Last Rites

"I see by your outfit you may be a preacher."

"Yes, I am, - of the non-theistic, non-sectarian sort." [...]

"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen"

-- Roger Zelazny: Creatures of Light and Darkness

From The Road to Mars by Eric Idle:

He thought of Lewis and his strange hobby. Lewis loved fishing in space. Yes, I know there are no fish in space, but catching fish is not at all the main point of fishing. Ninety percent of the activity is sitting with rod and reel just simply mulling things over. Lewis spent hours in a space suit sitting on top of the Ray with his line dangling, contemplating the sheer beauty of the Universe.
Or do you not like the idea of God at all? Molly absolutely rejected it. But then she hated anything without a molecular structure. She couldn't take it apart. Personally I'm a fence-sitter. But I not sure if the fence even exists.

From The Radio Beasts by Ralph Milne Farley, originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1925.

Radio! That word suggested to me the greatest radio genius whom I have ever known: Myles Standish Cabot, of Boston.
[...] If Cabot was still on earth, his story about his adventures on Venus, which I had so recently published to the world, must be nothing but a cleverly concocted lie.
[...] "Were you really on Venus?" I inquired, still incredulous.
"On my word of honor as a gentleman," said he, solemnly.
So the story was true after all, and I had not been hoaxed.
Just then the cell door opened, and a shackled figure was thrust rudely in. It was Poblath, the mango. His captor was Trisp, the bar-mango.
It was now Trisp's turn to gloat. Said he: "Long have I served as your assistant, O Poblath, and long have I coveted your position. Now it is mine for the asking. I suspected your of treason when you deprived Cabot of his antennae. I noted you preserved his apparatus in a cupboard in your office. But when you refused to permit the jailers to fire on the insurgent blockade in the street below, then I knew for sure of your treason to King Yuri. Now I go to clear the blockade. Thence to the king to be made mango of Kuana!"
"You have me in your power, yes," Cabot countered, "but you have had me in your power before. You induced that ant man, whom I called Satan, to try and kill me at Wautoosa, but Doggo interfered. Because of your scheming, the Formians condemned me to the Valley of the Howling Rocks, from whose frightful din no person has ever escaped; but nevertheless I got away. You overcame me in the strap-duel in the mangool of Kuana, and your knife was about to enter my heart, when I thumbed your ulnar nerve and made you drop your weapon. You arrested me in the stadium the day you killed your uncle, King Kew; you had Trisp, the bar-mango, destroy my antennae; yet I escaped and rejoined my army. You fed me to the woofuses, but one of them turned on you instead. In just what way to do plan to fail this time?"

L.E. Modesitt, Jr., [The Magic of Recluse]

"You are rather bitter for someone so young."
"That's easy when you're forced on a dangergeld for a reason you don't know by a group that enforces unspoken rules in unsaid ways."
A bright gray sky woke me, sunlight diffused through high, thin clouds. That, and the extraordinarily cheerful sound of some bird I did not know and wanted to strangle.

From Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic:

Ank-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course - it was not round and shiny - but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered in the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.
"Yes," said the troll. [...] "It was more interesting being a rock in the old days." "It was?" said Rincewind weakly. "Oh yes. No end of fun. Volcanoes all over the place. It really meant something, being a rock then. There was none of this sedimentary nonsense, you were igneous or nothing. Of course, that's all gone now. People call themselves trolls today, well, sometimes they're hardly more than slate. Chalk even. I wouldn't give myself airs if you could use me to draw with, would you?"

From Terry Pratchett, A Hatful of Sky (Corgi, 2005, ISBN 9780552551449):

She found her way into the kitchen. It was cold and quiet, except for the ticking of a clock on the wall. Both the hands had fallen off the clock face, and lay at the bottom of the glass cover, so while the clock was still measuring time it wasn't inclined to tell anyone about it.
[...]
Experimentally she took a spoon out of the spoon section, dropped it amongst the forks and shut the drawer. Then she turned her back.
There was a sliding noise and a tinkle exactly like the tinkle a spoon makes when it's put back among the other spoons, who have missed it and are anxious to hear its tales of life amongst the frighteningly pointy people.
[Chapter 3, A Single-minded Lady, p. 80-81]

From Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith (Doubleday, 2007, ISBN 9780385609845):

[...] Even thinking about Mrs Earwig made Granny Weatherwax angry. Mrs Earwig was all wrong to Granny Weatherwax. She wasn't born locally, which was almost a crime to begin with. [...]
[Chapter 2, Miss Treason, p. 31]
While Tiffany got herself ready, the old woman would up the clock with a horrible graunching noise. She was always winding it up; sometimes she stopped to do it in the middle of a judgement, with a room full of horrified people.
[Chapter 2, Miss Treason, p. 46]
The Morris men came to the village some time in May. You could never be sure when, because they had to call at lots of villages along the Chalk, and every village had a pub, which slowed them down.
They carried sticks and wore white clothes with bells on them, to stop them creeping up on people. No one likes an unexpected Morris dancer. Toffany would wait outside the village with the other children and dance behind them all the way in.
[Chapter 2, Miss Treason, p. 50]

From Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight (Doubleday, 2010, ISBN 9780485611077):

"[...] a dance hall in the city, where they intend to dance the waltz, which a well-brought-up young lady such as you should not know about, on account of the fact, it says in the paper, that it leads to depravity and goings-on."
[Chapter 6, The Coming of the Cunning Man, p. 106]
She stepped across to the horses, whispering a word into each fly-flicking ear, just to be on the safe side. Then she went back to Mr Carpetlayer, who was waiting obediently, not daring to move. As she rolled up her sleeves, he said, "You're not going to turn me into anything unnatural, are you miss? I wouldn't want to be a spider. Mortally afraid of spiders, and all my clothes are made for a man with two legs."
[Chapter 6, The Coming of the Cunning Man, p. 109]

From The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks:

[the horse-like creature] was beset by a small cloud of flies buzzing around its ear-flapping head like bothersome electrons around some reluctant nucleus.
-- from Road of Skulls
The next time I saw Li, he was wearing a uniform just like Captain Kirk's in Star Trek.
"Well, what on earth," I laughed.
"Don't mock, alien," Li scowled.
[...]
"You won't have heard," Li said, sitting beside me, "having been on EVA, but I'm intending to become captain of this tub."
"Are you really? Well, that's fascinating." I didn't ask him what or where the hell EVA was. "And how exactly do you propose attaining this elevated, not to say unlikely position?"
"I'm not sure yet," Li admitted, "but I think I have all the qualifications for the post."
"Consider the liminal cue given; I know you're going to --"
"Bravery, resourcefulness, intelligence, the ability to handle men - women -; a razor sharp wit and lightning-fast reactions. Also loyalty and the ability to be ruthlessly objective when the safety of my ship and crew are at stake. Except, of course, when the safety of the universe as we know it is at stake, in which case I would reluctantly have to consider making a brave and noble sacrifice. Naturally, should such a situation ever arise, I'd try to save the officers and crew who serve beneath me. I'd go down with the ship, of course."
"Of course. Well that's --"
"Wait; there's another quality I haven't mentioned yet."
"Are there any left?"
"Certainly. Ambition."
"Silly of me. Of course."
"It will not have escaped your attention that until now nobody ever thought of wanting to become captain of the Arb."
"A perhaps understandable lapse." Jhavins, one of my friends, brought off a fine cut on the black ball, and I applauded. "Good shot."
Li prodded my shoulder. "Listen properly."
"I'm listening. I'm listening."
"The point is that my wanting to become captain, I mean even thinking of the idea, means that I should be the captain, understand?"
"Hmm." Jhavins was lining up an unlikely cannon on a distant red.
"Li made an exasperated noise. "You're humouring me; I thought you at least would argue. You're just like everybody else."
"Ah," I said. Jhavins hit the red, but just left it handing over the pocket. I looked at Li. "An argument? All right; you - anybody - taking command of the ship is like a flea taking over control of a human ... maybe even like a bacteria in their saliva taking them over."
"But why should it command itself? We made it; it didn't make us."
"So? And anyway we didn't make it; other machines made it ... and even they only started it off; it mostly made itself. But anyway, you'd have to go back ... I don't know how many thousand generations of its ancestors before you found the last computer or spaceship built directly by any of our ancestors. Even if this mythical 'we' had built it, it's still zillions of times smarter than we are. Would you let an ant tell you what to do?"
"Bacterium? Flea? Ant? Make up your mind."
"Oh go away and de-scale a mountain or something, you silly man."
"But we started all this. If it hadn't been for us --"
"And who started us? Some glop of goo on another rock-ball? A super-nova? The big bang? What's starting something got to do with it?"
"You don't think I'm serious, do you?"
"More terminal than serious."
"You wait," Li said, standing up and wagging a finger at me. "I'll be captain one day. Any you'll be sorry; I had you down tentatively as science officer, but now you'll be lucky to make nurse in the sickbay."
"Ah, away and piss on your dilithium crystals."
-- from The State of the Art

From Pamela Sargent (Ed.), More Women of Wonder:

She was a creature of the wildest paradox, this warrior lady of Joiry, hot as a red coal, chill as steel, satiny of body and iron of soul. The set of her chin was firm, but her mouth betrayed a tenderness she would have died before admitting -- From Jirel Meets Magic by C. L. Moore

From Chung Kuo Book Eight: Marriage of the Living Dark by David Wingrove.

"He seems ... well, quite ordinary really. But who can tell? DeVore's so devious, I sometimes wake up wondering if I'm really me."

From R. A. MacAvoy, The Third Eagle:

Sugar was more or less taboo for the Wacaan, and for that reason, he enjoyed it immensely. Long after the dextrose let him down, the knowledge of his sin would keep Wanbli bright-eyed and smug. (He knew this about himself. He knew when and how to sin. He had learned it in school.)

From Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warriors's Apprentice:

He gathered himself and burst through the aperture with a kind of war whoop, fanning the room with his stunner, then stopped. It was a storage area, and empty but for a few plastic crates strapped into place. No sign of the enemy.
Miles poked his head in for a glance around, and stepped back thoughtfully. "You know," he said as they started back up the corridor, "it might be better if we don't yell, going in. It's startling. It's bound to be a lot easier to hit people if they're not jumping around and ducking behind things."
"They do it that way in the vids," Mayhew offered.
Miles, who had originally been planning his own first rush very much along the lines just demonstrated, and for much the same reason, cleared his throat. "I guess it just doesn't look very heroic to sneak up behind somebody and shoot them in the back. I can't help thinking it would be more efficient, though."
[..]
"And how was your first combat experience?" she asked, softly truculent.
He grinned involuntarily. "Educational. Very educational. Ah -- did you two happen to yell, charging through the door here?"
She blinked. "Sure. Why?"
"Just a theory I'm working on ..."

From Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game:

"But your most insidious chronic problem is in the area of ... how shall I put this precisely ... subordination. You argue too much."
"No, I don't," Miles began indignantly, then shut his mouth.
Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your ah ..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word.
"Equals?" Miles hazarded.
"Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.
-- p.7
"Is this a chain of command, or a chain of credulity?"
"There's a difference?" Miles grinned.
-- p.183

From Lois McMaster Bujold, Cetaganda:

"Please don't break ranks like that again."
"Did you receive a complaint?" And from whom?
"One learns to interpret certain pained looks. The Cetagandans would consider it impolite to complain -- "
"So use your initiative!"
"I don't have initiative. I follow orders, thank you. It's much safer that way."
"Fine. I order you to use your initiative."
Ivan breathed a bad word, by way of editorial. "I'm going to regret this. I know I am."

From Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms:

"[...] To wit, you are suspected of hiring those two goons who tried to assassinate Admiral Naismith at the shuttleport last week.
Miles stamped in a circle. "Ah. Ah. Agh!"
"The ambassador is filing protests all over the place. Naturally, we couldn't tell them why we thought they were mistaken."
Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't panic."
"I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining."
Miles paused in the Assize's soaring foyer to adjust his Dendarii admiral's uniform. "Do I look respectable?" he asked Quinn.
The beard makes you look, um ..."
Miles hastily trimmed the edges. "Distinguished? Older?"
"Hung over."
"No, no, never send interim reports," said Miles. "Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must then either obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem."
"[...] We uncovered a traitor, plugged a security leak, foiled a kidnapping, and broke up a major plot against the Barrayaran Imperium. And we got paid. What more do you want for one week?"
"Well, it would have been nice if any of that had been on purpose, instead of by accident," Miles mused.

From Esther Friesner (editor), Chicks in Chainmail:

Solid construction, he thought. The miniature ramparts atop the stone walls came complete with miniature crenellations -- too small for bowmen to hide behind, but they added a nice touch. Arrow slits decorated the second floor -- they were glassed over, though, so no one could actually shoot out of them. The machicolations above the main doorway looked real, however -- as though someone inside might consider pouring boiling oil onto the proselytizers and door-to-door salesmen who came calling. He approved. The place was definitely a concept house. He would bet the builders had pitched it to the family by saying "Think castle. Your own little castle."
From Armor-ella by Holly Liste
"Now, Mrs Batchett -- Roberta," Peterson said, sitting in his tan leather chair. "Would you like something? Cappuccino? A latté?" Charm oozed from him like yoghurt through a colander.
From On the Road of Silver by Mark Bourne

From Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance:

The traffic was worse than London's and, if possible, even more disorderly, or ordered according to some rule involving survival of the fittest.
"So ... do you approve of it, or not?" he asked, puzzled.
"I'm not sure my approval matters. The Imperium is like a very large and disjointed symphony, composed by a committee. Over a three-hundred year period. Played by a gang of amateur volunteers. It has enormous inertia, and is fundamentally fragile. It is neither unchanging nor unchangeable. It can crush you like a blind elephant."
"What a heartening thought."

From Esther Friesner (editor), Did You Say 'Chicks'?!:

You could read by the light of their eyes if you even mentioned gold to most mercenaries, let alone showed it to them. The flash of it on Terion's black armor would bring them running like bees to a honeypot. Large, brawny, aggressive, homicidal bees with things that were sharp, or pointed, or heavy -- some of them sharp, pointed and heavy.
-- From Armor Propre by Jan Stirling & S.M. Stirling.

From Esther Friesner (editor), The Chick is in the Mail (Baen Books, 2000):

Duke Janifer was not really listening. He continued to pace the hall. Unlike his forefathers, he never sat upon the intricately carved and gilded Siege of Justice when hearing a case. Some said it was because he was a true friend of the people and disliked setting himself too far above his subjects. Others, including his old nurse Wylalie, said it was because he was a fidget, born with that condition commonly referred to as "shrews in your trews". [Troll by Jury, by Esther M. Friesner, p. 143]:
The Janplit Mountains between Alowey and Damery were tall and forbidding, infested with nasty hulking bandits who hardly ever changed their socks or wrote home to their mothers. [From Hallah Iron-Thighs & the Change of Life, by K.D. Wentworth, p. 291]

From Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr:

"My lord!" said Tuomonen, pulling down his breath mask. His tone of voice sounded familiarly maternal to Ekaterin's ear, halfway between Thank God you're safe and I'm going to strangle you with my bare hands. (p.154)
"Ah," said Miles thickly. He struggled upright. Madame Vorsoisson was holding out a tray with a large mug of black coffee and a bottle of painkiller tablets. Two tablets had already been extracted from the bottle, and lay ready for ingestion beside the cup. Only in his imagination did a heavenly choir supply background music. "Oh. My." (p.163)

From Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign:

They made that noise when they're happy," Enrique informed Martya, in response to her doubtful stare.
"Oh," said Martya.
"Would you like to pet her?" He held out the giant bug invitingly.
"Well ... why not?" Martya, too, attempted the experiment, and was rewarded by another hiss, as the bug arched her back. Martya smiled crookedly.
Privately, Kareen thought that any man whose idea of a good time was to feed, pet, and care for a creature that mainly responded to his worship with hostile noises was going to get along great with Martya.

From Quarantine by Greg Egan (Century, 1992):

A few intellectual rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorphic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows. [Chapter 1, p. 16]
I shake my head, still suspicious. I don't often get this lucky. Karen leans over my shoulder and says, "That's the definition of luck, you moron. Hurry up and pack." [Chapter 2, p. 30-31]
She scowls. "Don't be so reasonable, it makes me sick. You didn't want us to be right. I don't expect you to slit your wrists, but can't you be at least a little ... sullen?"
"Not on duty."
[Chapter 8, p. 118-119]
It's hard to feel conspiratorial at nine in the morning. [Chapter 9, p. 129]

From Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan (Gollancz, 2002):

Mariama glared at him until he dropped his hand. "It's not the same thing. But I wouldn't expect you to understand."
Tchicaya winced. "So now I'm an all-round philistine?"
Mariama's face softened. She reached over and ran a hand across his stubbled scalp. "No. Your failings are much more specific than that."
[Chapter 7, p. 86]
"What kind of gifts?"
"Art. Music. Theorems."
"Original theorems?"
"If you're serious." [...] Yann laughed at Tchicaya's expression of astonishment and added, "It's not always that serious" [...]
"So you start with something easier?"
Yann nodded. "When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweetheart was a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions into principle bundles over the three-sphere. Ancient constructions, although I did rediscover them myself."
"How were they received?"
"She liked them so much, she extended them to larger spaces and gave me back the result." [...] "So what about you?
"I've generally had more success with flowers."
[Chapter 8, p. 97-98]
"[...] I once read a glorious tract which asserted that as soon as there was intelligence without bodies, its 'unstoppable lust for processing power' would drive it to convert the whole Earth, and then the whole universe, into a perfectly efficient Planck-scale computer. Self-restraint? Nah, we'd never show that. Morality? What, without livers and gonads? Needing some actual reason to want to do this? Well ... who could ever have too much computing power?
To which I can only reply: why haven't you indolent fleshers transformed the whole galaxy into chocolate?"
[Chapter 8, p. 107]
"[..] All we have to do now is disguise it." He added, deadpan, "You can obfuscate, can't you? Physicists have been taking simple mathematical ideas and obfuscating them for centuries. It must have been part of your training, surely?"
[Chapter 10, p. 127]

From The Eternal Flame (Orthogonal Trilogy book 2) by Greg Egan (Gollancz, 2012):

"Western shrub voles, to be precise," Carlo replied. "They're the biparous ones. But they have no males, so that doesn't really help - breeding still doubles their numbers. As far as anyone knows, there's never been an animal population that was stable in the absence of predation, famine or disease."
"Don't get discouraged," Carla said, reaching over and putting a hand on his shoulder. "That's just the history of life for the last few eons. It's not as if it's a law of physics."
[p. 91-92]

From The Golden Torc by Julian May (Pan Books, 1981):

More serious-minded revellers (and the maudlin drunks) gathered about a crookbacked goblin bard who had reached the one-hundred-sixty-fifth verse of a lugubrious ballad of doomed Firvulag lovers. Cheerier souls were conconcting ingenious new stanzas to the soldiers' beloved drinking song, "A Princess Must Never Have Fleas," detailing those eccentricities that the royal demoiselle might legitimately expect to get away with. [...]
[From Part II, "The Closure", Chapter 2, p. 161]

From Jack the Bodiless by Julian May (Pan Books, 1992):

"I have summoned a surface vessel," Loga'etoo Tilk'ai said aloud in a peculiar voice reminiscent of a talking kettledrum, "which will convey us to my personal domicilium, located less than a kilometre offshore. There for the next three hours you will receive a superficial but rewarding introduction to Krondak domestic life.
"It will be our pleasure," said Marc. The younger boys were trying valiantly to conceal their despair, which the girls wore superior smiles.
"My own three beloved larvae have done careful research on human dietary needs and will prepare luncheon for you as an educational exercise," Loga'etoo continued, expanding her buccal orifice in the Krondak equivalent of a smile. "I know you will be forbearing if their efforts show occasional amateurish lapses in culinary technique. I will make quite sure that none of the food served to you is poisonous or completely unfit for human consumption."
"I'm quite certain it will be delicious," Marc said, administering ceorcive prods to the petrified cousins.
"Delicious!" they parroted.
[Chapter 20, p. 245]

From Perseus Spur [Rampart Worlds Book 1] by Julian May (Voyager [HarperCollins], 1998):

[...] we passed some of the time watching the archival holovids that had been part of Karl's report. Matt had already studied both of them, but the information was new to Ivor and me.
The first show was a sort of Appalled Armchair Tourist's Guide to Cravat that set out to scare the shit out of you by describing abominations of the planet's geography, flora and fauna. Summed up, just about everything was out to get you. [...] Matt shared reminiscences of her own earlier visits to the Green Hell, which were even more bloodcurdling than the damned video. [...]
[Chapter 14, p. 169]

From Orion Arm [Rampart Worlds Book 2] by Julian May (Voyager [HarperCollins], 1999):

[...] His overhasty departure from [Kedge-Lockerby] was occasioned by a nasty flap back on Artiuk involving some drunken Carnelian robotics engineers, a much-prized xeno domestic animal and an enraged Haluk bureaucrat. [...]
[Chapter 5, p. 102]
[...] The most prominent feature of the local biota was a species of tree that had foliage like purple noodles. I also recalled that leeches with teeth were apt to pop out of puddles and nibble your boots as you walked about the bustling city.
[Chapter 6, p. 124]

From The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (Voyager [imprint of Harper Collins], London 2002):

"[...] five times mercy, High Ones, we beseech you." Whatever sins the man had committed, he had surely paid. Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice. [Chapter 1, p. 8]
Cazaril was unsure of the Provincara's allegiance to the processes of law, but he wagered the business of leaving loose enemies about had plucked some, ah, housewifely nerve of hers. [Chapter 4, p. 59]
Umegat sat back and studied him for a time. Cazaril didn't think the Roknari was looking at his flesh. So, tell me, what's a renegade Roknari Temple divine scholar-saint of the Bastard doing disguised as a groom in the Zangre's menagerie? Out loud, he managed to pare this down to a plaintive, "What are you doing here?" [Chapter 13, p. 199]
Cazaril's attention was arrested by a pebble that lay on the pavement near his knee. It was so dense. So persistent. The gods could not lift so much as a feather, but he, a mere human, might pick up this ancient unchanging object and place it wherever he wished, even in his pocket. He wondered why he had never appreciated the stubborn fidelity of matter. A dried leaf lay nearby, even more stunning in its complexity. Matter invented so many forms, and then went on to generate beauty beyond itself, minds and souls rising up out of it like a melody from an instrument ... matter was an amazement to the gods. Matter remembered itself so very clearly. He could not think why he had failed to notice it before. His own shaking hand was a miracle, as was the fine metal sword in his belly, and the orange trees in the tubs - one was tipped over now, wonderfully fractured and spilling - and the tubs, and the birdsong starting in the morning, and the water - water! Five gods, water! - in the fountain, and the morning light filtering into the sky ...
[Chapter 27, p. 412]
Palli's mouth quirked in bemusement. "Is this poetry or fever, Caz?"
"Oh, it's a great infection of poetry, a contagion of hymns. The gods delight in poets, you know. Songs and poetry, being of the same stuff as souls, can cross into their world almost unimpeded. Stone carvers, now ... even the gods are in awe of stone carvers." He squinted in the sun and grinned back at Palli.
"Nevertheless," murmured Palli dryly, "one feels your quatrain yesterday morning to Lady Betriz's nose was a tactical mistake."
"I was not making fun of her!" Cazaril protested indignantly. "Was she still angry at me when she left?"
"No, no, she wasn't angry! She was persuaded it was fever, and was very worried withal. If I were you, I've claim it for fever."
"I could not write a poem to all of her just yet. I tried. Too overwhelming."
"Well, if you must scribble paeans to her body parts, pick lips. Lips are more romantic than noses."
"Why?" asked Cazaril. "Isn't every part of her an amazement?"
"Yes, but we kiss lips. We don't kiss noses. Normally. Men write poems to the objects of our desire in order to lure them closer."
"How practical. In that case, you'd think men would write more poems to ladies' private parts."
"The ladies would hit us. Lips are a safe compromise, being as it were a stand-in or stepping-stone to greater mysteries."
[Chapter 28, p. 423]

From Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (Voyager [imprint of Harper Collins], London 2004):

Ista sat in her mother's rose arbour, twisting a fine handkerchief in her fingers. Her lady attendant sat near her, poking at a piece of embroidery with a needle as narrow as, though rather sharper than, her mind.
[Chapter 2, p. 19]
She had accepted her guard troop at first as an unavoidable encumbrance, and ignored them. But over the days of her journey she had learned names, faces, life stories - most very short. They had begun to look less like blank-faced soldiers, responsible for her, and more like overgrown children. She did not care for this oppressive shift in her perceptions. She did not want to be responsible for them. I had no luck with sons. Yet loyalty must run two ways, or else become betrayal in the egg.
[Chapter 5, p. 81]
"When the man arises who can make you laugh, solemn Ista, angry Ista, iron Ista, then your heart will be healed. You have not prayed for this: it's a guerdon even the gods cannot give you. We are limited to such simples as redemption from your sins."
[Chapter 11, p. 214]

From The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit 2004)

"[...] Is nineteen o'clock convenient for you?"
Fassin thought. "Actually, the lady Jaal Tonderon and I might be --"
"The answer you are searching for is 'Yes', Seer Taak," Verpych said.
Fassin frowned down at the older man. "Then in that case why did you --?"
"I was being polite."
"Ah. Of course. That cannot come easily."
"Quite the contrary. It is deference that one sometimes struggles with."
"Your efforts are appreciated, I'm sure."
"Why, I live for nothing else, young master." Verpych smiled thinly.
[Part One: The Autumn House, p. 34-35]
"Sir, we have encountered several problems," the technician said slowly, his gaze flicking from Fassin to Verpych.
"I do so hope the next word is 'But' or 'However'," Verpych said. He glanced at Fassin. "A 'Happily' would be too much to ask for, of course."
The technician continued. "Thanks to our considerable efforts, sir, we believe we have the situation in hand. I would hope that we ought to be ready by the appointed hour."
[Part One: The Autumn House, p. 36]
The official was speaking the human version of Standard, the galaxy's lingua franca. Standard had been chosen as an interspecies, pan-galactic language over eight billion years ago. [...]
"Usual thing; lots of competing so-called universal standards. There was a proper full-scale war after one linguistic disagreement [...] and after that came the usual response: inquiries, missions, meetings, reports, conferences, summits.
"What we now know as Standard was chosen after centuries of research, study and argument by a vast an unwieldy committee composed of representatives from thousands of species, at least two of which became effectively extinct during the course of the deliberations. It was chosen, astonishingly, on its merits, because it was an almost perfect language: flexible, descriptive, uncoloured (whatever that means, but apparently it's important), precise but malleable, highly, elegantly complete yet primed for external-term-adoption and with an unusually free but logical link between the written form and the pronounced which could easily and plausibly embrace almost any set of phonemes, scints, glyphs or pictals and still make translatable sense.
"Best of all, it didn't belong to anybody, the species which had invented it having safely extincted themselves millions of years earlier without leaving either any proven inheritors or significant mark on the greater galaxy, save this sole linguistic gem. Even more amazingly, the subsequent conference to endorse the decision of the mega-committee went smoothly and agreed all the relevant recommendations. Take-up and acceptance were swift and widespread. Standard became the first and so far only true universal language within just a few Quick-mean generations. Set a standard for pan-species cooperation that everybody's been trying to live up to ever since. [...]"
[Part Two: Destructive Recall, p. 100-101]
"May I continue?" the image said after the next few contributions showed unmistable signs of heading in the direction of becoming not so much questions as attestations of innocence, pledges of heroic determination, position-protection statements and attacks on other functionaries present within a wide spectrum of subtlety, biased toward the low end. [...]
[Part Two: Destructive Recall, p. 107]
[...] A Sarcomage outranked a Hierchon, and was in turn answerable to a Complector, any single one of which [...] themselves had at least to take into account the will of the Complector Council. The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council were bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and were generally held to be putting considerable effort into getting around those.
[Part Two: Destructive Recall, p. 109-110]
Braam Ganscerel, Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon [...] was tall and thin and maned in white hair. [...] He had a sharp, angular face with a large nose, his skin was pale, waxy and translucent and his fingers and hands were long and fragile-seeming. He habitually walked and stood with his head back and chest out, as though he had long ago vowed not to appear stooped as he grew into great old age and had gone too far in the other direction. This curious stance meant that his head was angled so far back on his neck that he had no choice but to look down his splendidly monumental nose at those he talked with, to or at. [...]
[Part Three: Nowhere Left to Fall, p. 152]
[...] The majority of people were content to walk, and made their slow progress by way on an infinitude of quiet, effectively separate deserted streets, quiet parks, vacant lots, remains of wasteland and an entire unmapped network of paths, pavements, alleys, steps, ladders, wynds and snickets.
[Part Four: Event During War Time, p. 239]
[...] He had also realised that innocents died just as filthily and in equally great numbers in a just war as they did in an unjust one, and had known that war was to be avoided at almost all costs just because it magnified mistakes, exaggerated errors, but still he'd hoped there would somehow be an elegance about his involvement in the struggle against the Mercatoria, a degree of gloriousness, a touch of the heroic.
Instead: muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death - all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictiveness, just through the ghastly, banal working-out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.
[...] Revenge was a poor way out too, he thought through his tears. [...] There was an argument that it would only make him as bad as them, but then he knew that in a way he was already just as bad as them. The only moral reason for doing it would be to rid the world, the galaxy, the universe of one self-evidently bad person. As though there would ever be a shortage, as though that wouldn't just leave the same niche for another.
[Part Four: Event During War Time, p. 284-285]
[...] Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
[Part Five: Conditions of Passage, p. 368]
As he slid into unconsciousness, Fassin's thoughts were of how beautiful the Clouder had looked. The vast being was like a million great long gauzy scarves of light, a whisper of matter and gravity close to nothingness that massed more than many solar systems, drifting yet purposeful, intent by ancient decision, along a course charted out over millions of years, propelled, dirigible by minute flexings of cold plasmas, by the force of near-not-there-at-all magnetic fields, by sigh-strength expulsions and drawings-in of interstellar material. Cold and dead-seeming yet alive and thinking. And beautiful, in the right light. Seen in a fitting wash of wavelengths, there was something endlessly, perfectly sublime about ...
[Part Five: Conditions of Passage, p. 370-371]

From Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Penguin, UK, 1993):

The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. [Chapter 6, p. 52]
The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. [Chapter 15, p. 119]
The front room of the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is, of course, like all the others. A row of padded chairs where worshippers can wait for their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table strewn with primaeval magazines. [Chapter 25, p. 181]
[...] Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran over her with all eighteen wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the road using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop. But sometimes when you're a professional, they give you a job that you don't like, and you just have to be very cool and put up with it. [Chapter 29, p. 205]
"What does ultima ratio regum mean?"
"'The Last Argument of Kings,'" the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign."
[Chapter 55, p. 365]

From Terry Pratchett, Making Money (TransWorld, an imprint of Random House, 2007):

The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantata and Fugue for Someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals.
[Chapter 7, p. 217]
His secretary laid before him the paper, carefully folded to the correct page and place, which was occupied by a square filled with a lot of smaller squares, some of them containing numbers.
"Today's 'Jikan no Muda', sir," he said. Vetinari glanced at it for a few seconds, and then handed it back to him.
The Patrician shut his eyes and drummed his fingers on the desktop for a moment.
"Hm ... 9 6 3 1 7 4" - Drumknott scribbled hastily as the numbers streamed and eventually concluded - "8 4 2 3. And I'm sure they used that one last month. On a Monday, I believe."
"Seventeen seconds, sir," said Drumknott, his pencil still catching up up.
"Well, it has been a tiring day," said Vetinari. "And what is the point? Numbers are easy to outwit. They can't think back. The people who devise the crosswords, now they are indeed devious. Who would know that "pysdxes" are ancient Ephebian carved-bone needle-holders?"
"Well, you, sir, of course," said Drumknott, carefully stacking the files, "and the curator of Ephebian Antiquities at the Royal Art Museum, 'Puzzler' of the Times and Miss Grace Speaker, who runs the pet shop in Pellicool Steps."
"We should keep an eye on that pet shop, Drumknott. A woman with a mind like that content to dispense dog food? I think not."
"Indeed, sir. I shall make a note."
[Chapter 8, p. 237-238]
[時間の無駄, jikan no muda, is Japanese. The apparent meaning is "waste of time" -- Fred]

From Randall Garrett, Unwise Child (Doubleday, NY, 1962):

Mike the Angel hefted the heavy stun gun in his right fist, finding its weight without really noticing it. He knew damned good and well it wouldn't be of any use against Snookumns. If Mellon came at him, the supersonic beam from the gun would affect his nerves in the same way an electric current would, and he'd collapse, unconscious but relatively unharmed. But Mike doubted if seriously that it would have any effect at all on the metal body of the robot. It is as difficult to jolt the nerves of a robot as it is to blind an oyster.
[Chapter 16, p. 151]
"Night, sir," said Multhaus. "See you in the morning."
"Yeah. Night." Mike trudged toward the companionway that led to the wardroom. If Keku or Jeffers hapened to be there, he'd have a quick round of Uma ni tō. Jeffers called the game "double solitaire for three people", and Keku said it meant "horses' two heads", but Mike simply found it as a new game to play before bedtime.
[Chapter 21, p. 185-186]
[馬二頭, Uma ni tō, is Japanese. Have not been able to track down a card game of this name -- Fred]

From Robert Tralins, Android Armageddon (Paramount Books, 1974):

He drew his weapon and stood waiting, watching as two androids in gray uniform coveralls descended. [...]
[...] They watched the androids for several minutes [...]
When the androids were gone, Doyle and the others assembled at the base of the obelisk.
[This single page is the only reference in the entire book to androids -- Fred]
[Chapter 1, Android Armageddon, p. 7]
Kagan was the empirical model of a professional soldier. [Here 'empirical' apparently means something different to any dictionary definition of the word -- Fred]
[Chapter 6, Ceremony, p. 67]
[...] Doyle thought the code that had been perfected originally in 1843 by Francis Fauvel-Gouraud -- the man who had amazed audiences on earth by demonstrating that man could tap the other 95 percent of his potential brain power [...]
[Chapter 6, Ceremony, p. 70]
"[...] It must be done from within, not from without. Like the Communists did when they took over the United States and all the other countries of the Western Hemisphere on earth in the last years of the twentieth century. [...]
[Chapter 7, Kinsmen, p. 91]
"I am in charge of this complex," Kagan said flatly. "The Secretariat charged me with the duty of seeing to your welfare and safety since you are such an important man now that you've been honoured with the post of Orrery Commandant."
"I don't give a sine wave if you're in charge of the chamber pots!" cried Doyle. "I demand an explanation!"
[Chapter 8, Custodial, p. 95]
From above came a great whirring sound like the rushing of whirling electrons in a cyclotron. [...]
[A rather quiet whirring since electrons in a cyclotron move in a vacuum -- Fred]
[Chapter 9, Trial, p. 109]
[...] colonies were started in all hemispheres [of the planet ...]
[How many hemispheres does the average sphere have? -- Fred]
[Chapter 12, Search, p. 135]

From Clifford D. Simak, Strangers in the Universe [Short Stories] (Faber & Faber, London, 1959):

"An alternative?"
"Why, certainly. Some other line of work that might prove happier. I have counselled a number of gentlemen who changed their line of work, and it has proved for the best."
"No," said Craig. "I haven't the least idea what I might go into."
"There are a number of openings," said the counsellor. "Almost anything you wish. There's snail watching, for example."
"No," said Craig.
"Or stamp collecting," said the counsellor. "Or knitting. A lot of gentlemen knit and find it very soothing."
"I don't want to knit," said Craig.
"You could make money."
"What for?" asked Craig.
"Well, now," the counsellor said, "that is something I've often wondered, too. There's no need of it, really. All you have to do to get money is go to a bank and ask for some of it. But there are men who actually set out to make money and, if you ask me, they use some rather shady methods. But, be that as it may, they seem to get a great deal of satisfaction doing it."
"What do they do with it once they get it?" asked Craig.
"I wouldn't know," the counsellor told him. "One man buried it and then forgot where he buried it and he remained happy the rest of his life running around with a lantern and a shovel looking for it."
"Why the lantern?"
"Oh, I forgot to tell you that. He never hunted it in daylight. He hunted in the night."
"Did he ever find it?"
"Come to think of it," the counsellor said, "I don't believe he did."
"I don't think," said Craig, "that I'd care for making money."
[...] "You might get married," the counsellor suggested.
"What? You mean to one woman?"
"That is what I mean."
"And raise a bunch of kids?"
"Many men have done it," said the counsellor. "They have been quite satisfied."
"It seems," said Craig, "on the face of it, just a bit obscene."
"There are many other possibilities," the counsellor told him.
[The Fence, p. 90-91]

From Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background (Orbit, 2007):

"-- and what might most charitably be called a chequered school history."
"A lot of those records really shouldn't be trusted."
"Yes, there is quite a remarkable disparity between the written reports and most of the associated computer files. Several of the institutions you attended seemed to feel there might be a causal link between this phenomenon and your uncharacteristic keenness for the subject of computing."
"Coincidence; they couldn't prove a thing."
"Indeed, I don't think I've heard of anybody suing a school yearbook before."
"A matter of principle; family honour was at stake. And anyway, litigiousness runs in our family. Gorko issued a writ against his father for more pocket money when he was five and Geis has almost sued himself several times."
[Chapter 1, Overture, p. 20-21]
She opened her eyes groggily, to focus on a man sitting less than a metre away. He was dressed in a uniform that hurt her eyes; bright violet and shining yellow. His face was round and dark and very serious. "Who are you?" she whispered.
"I am God," he said, nodding politely. [...]
"God?" she said.
The man nodded. "God," he said.
"I see," she said, drifting away again.
[...]
"God?" she said to the man with the dark, round face she'd seen earlier in what she had assumed to be a dream. He shifted awkwardly on the small plastic seat and brushed imaginary dust from the thigh of his violently clashing yellow and violet uniform trousers. "Well," he said. "Technically, yes." A pained expression passed over his face.
"Right," she said. "I see."
"I used," the man offered, frowning, "to be called Elson Roa." He was tall and spindly and he sat very still with a look of faint surprise on his face. His fair hair stuck up from his forehead, adding to the impression of slight bewilderment.
"Elson Roa," she repeated.
"But then I became God," he nodded. "Or rather realised that I always had been God. God in the monotheistic sense that I am all that really exists." He was silent for a moment. "I can see you are an apparence who is going to need an explanation."
"An explanation," she said. "Yes. That might be a good idea."
[...]
Sharrow had been captured by Solipsists.
They were a fifty-or-so-strong band of licensed privateers [...] dedicated to self-fulfilment, union-rate security provision, and - where possible - robbing the rich. Mostly, however, they were hired by insurance and finance companies to frighten reluctant clients and repossess unpaid-for material. [...]
[...]
"But if you're God," Sharrow said to Elson Roa, "why do you need the others?"
"What others?" Roa said.
Sharrow looked exasperated. "Oh, come on."
Elson Roa shrugged. "My apparences? They are the sign that my will is not yet strong enough to support my existence without extraneous help. I am working on this." Roa coughed.
[...] "So, she said. "Are you immortal?"
Roa looked thoughtful. "I'm not sure," he said. "The idea may not be relevant; time itself may be a redundant concept. What do you think? I may have created you as a platform for part of just such an answer."
"I really have no idea," she confessed. She waved a hand towards the bulkhead behind her. "What about the others? Do they - the apparences - all call themselves God, too?" she asked.
"Apparently," Roa said, without the hint of a smile.
[...] Roa looked suddenly confused. "Um, apart from one, who's an atheist," he said suddenly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"We all call ourselves God except for one apparence, who is an atheist."
"Ah-ha," she said, nodding slowly. "And what does this person call themself?"
"'Me.'"
"Uh-huh."
Roa cleared his throat, then closed his eyes and made a strange humming noise while rolling his head around on his neck for a few moments.
The he opened his eyes. She smiled at him.
He looked displeased, got up and walked out.
She suspected he'd been hoping that when he opened his eyes she'd have disappeared.
[...]
"Well," Roa said to her. "Here we are. I have no idea whether I shall need you in the future, but I trust I imagine you well, if we do meet again." He fell silent and stared at his fingernails. [...] Keteo the driver was gunning the engine. [...] Roa looked away and closed his eyes. He made a humming noise and started to roll his head.
She got down out of the half-track and stood on the road. Buses grumbled past; people [...] walked past.
Elson Roa opened his eyes. He looked briefly delighted, then saw her standing on the road surface and started. He frowned down at her.
"Oh," he said. "Politeness." He reached down with one hand. She shook it. "Good-bye," he said.
"Good-bye," she replied, and turned and walked away.
When she looked back, Roa and the other back-seat Solipsist were arguing vehemently with the driver [...]
[Chapter 6, Solo, p. 109-118]
It was mid-morning; the high cirrus clouds were poised like feathery arches over the warming expanse of karst, and the still air sucked sweat from exposed skin with an enthusiasm bordering on kleptomania. [...]
[Chapter 7, Operating Difficulties, p. 121]
[...] "And how may this humble and undeserving scholar help two such radiantly pulchritudinous gentle-ladies?" [...] His expression was somewhere between mischievous and lecherous. [...] "How may Travapeth help you, my saxicolous damsels?"
[Chapter 10, Just a Concept, p. 182]
Miz peered. "Parphech?" he said. "Never heard of it."
"I have," Zefla said. [...] "One of my lecturers used it as example of a degenerated ... something or other."
[...] "Last entry in the encyclopedia is - ye gods - twenty years ago; the coronation of King Tard the seventeenth. Prophet's blood!" Cenuij sat back in surprise. "'No pictures available.'"
"A king?" Miz laughed.
"Retro suburb," Zefla breathed.
"The latest of the ..." Cenuij scrolled the screen then laughed. "Useless Kings," he said. "Well, how disarmingly honest."
[...] "Does it say what their religion is?"
Cenuij scrolled the text. "Basically home-grown; monarch-worship and theophobia."
"Theophobia?" Miz said.
"They hate gods," Zefla said.
"Fair enough," Miz said, nodding. "If I lived somewhere not event within hailing distance of the outskirts of the back-end-of-nowhere, I'd want somebody to blame, too."
[Chapter 9, Reunions, p. 159]
The rest of the town had been confusing, repetitive, occasionally riotous. The cathedral was small and disappointing; even its bell, which rang out each hour, sounded flat. The only really interesting feature the cathedral possessed was a stone statue of the Pharpechian God on the outside of the building, having various unpleasant things done to Him by small, fiendishly grinning Pharpechian figures armed with farming implements and instruments of torture.
[...] The monstery hospitale where Cenuij had been given a bed for the night looked closed and deserted, though they could hear muted curse-singing over the high walls.
[Chapter 12, Snow Fall, p. 224]

From Harry Harrison & Marvin Minsky, The Turing Option (Viking, 1992):

"[...] You want security for those files -- and so do we. Phone lines can be tapped, data copied. And GRAMs can go astray in the mail."
"GRAM? Don't you mean DRAM?"
"A thing of the past. Dynamic random-access memory is now as dead as the dodo. These gigabyte ERAMs are static, no need for batteries, and have so much memory that they are replacing CDs and digital audiotape. With the new semantic compression techniques they'll soon replace videotape as well."
[Chapter 16, November 14, 2023, p. 160]

From Nick Pollotta & James Clay, That Darn Squid God (Double Dragon Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-55404-519-8):

Incredulously, the professor watched as the woman deliberately lifted the hem of her skirt and teasingly revealed a sweetly shaped ankle. Then she wiggled it!
The hussy! A proper Victorian gentleman, Professor Einstein felt his mouth go dry at the raw sexual display. I-I c-can almost see her actual leg!
Dropping the hem again, she now slowly unbuttoned her blouse, exposing a full inch of swelling cleavage.
Desperately fighting not to rise to the carnal bait, the professor tried juggling algebraic equations and logarithms in his head. Euclid, save this mortal wretch!
[Chapter 7, p. 75]
Twelve times the Squid God worshippers had attacked the museum, and each sally had been bloodier and more vicious than the last. With rifle and crossbow, she had eliminated a dozen of the bounders, but still they came on and on, as unstoppable as army ants, or barristers.
[Chapter 11, p. 113]
Impatiently, Mary snatched the key from her uncle and started releasing the collection of heavy padlocks. As each lock was disengaged, she yanked away the accompanying chain and tossed it over a shoulder into the rose garden.
When the iron-plated door was finally revealed, Professor Einstein replaced his neice at the door and spun the combination dial to his birthday, height, and the number of times he had been arrested in Tokyo. With a solid clunk, the internal bolts disengaged, and Einstein pushed open the armoured door.
[Chapter 27, p. 269]

From Asgard by Nigel Frith, (Unicorn [Unwin Paperbacks], 1982, ISBN 0049232092):

[...] And so he took her in his arms and comforted her, and said, "Have no fear, my little one, for I shall never harm you, I love you too much, and my lust is too strong. Come then, dry your tears, and let us laugh at our loving. And let us just lie and talk and kiss. For there is as much sweetness and we are as much together. For you, my love, are like a thousand white horses, flying and shying over fertile plains. And you are like a mad house of otters, thwacking and tumbling in the green-weeded streams. And you are like the rich moonlight of Midgard, that floats on the mists among the birches of the vales. And you are like a seam of gold in the black earth, that hides its great wealth in the passes of the eagles. [...]"
[p. 171-172]

From Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand (Corgi, 2010, ISBN 9780552562799):

They've got the worst taste in the world, magicians. Oh, they keep themselves all suave and sober in public, but give them a chance to relax and do they listen to chamber orchestras? No. They'd rather have a dwarf on stilts or a belly-dancing bearded lady. A little-known fact about Solomon the Wise: he was entertained between judgements by an enthusiastic troup of Lebanese girners.
[Footnote, Chapter 34, p. 363]:

From Jonathan Stroud, The Golem's Eye (Corgi, 2010, ISBN 9780552562812):

The British Museum was home to a million antiquities, several dozen of which were legitimately come by. [...]
[Footnote, Chapter 16, p. 178]

From Jonathan Stroud, Ptolemy's Gate (Corgi, 2010, ISBN 9780552562805):

[...] An expensive suit hung uneasily on his frame, as if reluctant to get too close; his shirt was a disturbing mauve. He was pale-faced and a bit freckly, with small eyes peering myopically from behind thick glasses and reddish hair plastered back in a kind of oily pelt, reminiscent of a fox who'd been caught out in the rain. Small bony hands tapped unenthusiastically at a typewriter. [...]
[Chapter 9, p. 112]

From Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon (Corgi, 2010, ISBN 9780385619165):

How slowly, how painfully the long years pass when you're immured inside a bottle! I don't recommend the experience to anyone.
Footnote: Humans don't often suffer such indignities, I know, but it has happened. One magician I worked for once called for my aid during an earthquake which was toppling his tower. Unfortunately for him, the precise words he used were: "Preserve me!" A cork, a great big bottle, a vat of pickling fluid, and - presto! - the job was done. [...]
[Chapter 23, p. 229]
Zealots: wild-eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world - a certainty which can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.
[Footnote, Chapter 23, p. 239]
Can you define 'plan' as a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision and ignorance? If so, it was a very good plan.
[Footnote, Chapter 25, p. 252]

From Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury, 2009, ISBN 9781608190867):

It was a difficult time to be a Minister. The war went from bad to worse and the Government was universally detested. As each fresh catastrophe came to the public’s notice some small share of blame might attach itself to this or that person, but in general everyone united in blaming the Ministers, and they, poor things, had no one to blame but each other which they did more and more frequently.
It was not that the Ministers were dull-witted -- upon the contrary there were some brilliant men among them. Nor were they, upon the whole, bad men; several led quite blameless domestic lives and were remarkably fond of children, music, dogs, landscape painting. Yet so unpopular was the Government that, had it not been for the careful speeches of the Foreign Secretary, it would have been almost impossible to get any piece of business through the House of Commons.
The Foreign Secretary was a quite peerless orator. No matter how low the Government stood in the estimation of everyone, when the Foreign Secretary stood up and spoke -- ah! how different everything seemed then! How quickly was every bad thing discovered to be the fault of the previous administration (an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose). As for the present Ministry, the Foreign Secretary said that not since the days of Antiquity had the world seen gentlemen so virtuous, so misunderstood and so horribly misrepresented by their enemies. They were all as wise as Solomon, as noble as Caesar and as courageous as Mark Antony; and no one in the world so much resembled Socrates in point of honesty as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in spite of all these virtues and abilities none of the Ministers’ plans to defeat the French ever seemed to come to anything and even their cleverness was complained of Country gentlemen who read in their newspapers the speeches of this or that Minister would mutter to themselves that he was certainly a clever fellow. But the country gentlemen were not made comfortable by this thought. The country gentlemen had a strong suspicion that cleverness was somehow unBritish. That sort of restless, unpredictable brilliance belonged most of all to Britain’s arch-enemy, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte; the country gentlemen could not approve it.
[vol. I, Mr Norrell, Chapter 6, "Magic is not respectable, sir.", p. 69-70]
The most senior officer at Brest at that time was Admiral Desmoulins. He had a servant, a very small man no bigger than an eight-year-old child, and as dark as a European can be. He looked as if he had been put into the oven and baked for too long and was now rather overdone. His skin was the colour of a coffee-bean and the texture of a dried-up rice-pudding. His hair was black, twisted and greasy like the spines and quills you may observe on the less succulent parts of roasted chickens. His name was Perroquet (which means parrot).
[vol. I, Mr Norrell, Chapter 11, Brest. November 1807, p. 109]
"Stephen!" he cried, "Have you brought a flaughter, a rutter and a tusker?"
"What, sir? Which, sir? No, sir. I have not brought any of those things."
[...]
The gentleman disappeared suddenly -- and reappeared a moment later with an armful of tools. There was an axe and a spit and three things Stephen had never seen before. One was a little like a hoe, one was a little like a spade and the last was a very strange object, something between a spade and a scythe. He handed all of them to Stephen, who examined them with a puzzled air.
[...]
The gentleman proved surprizingly knowledgeable about the art of peat cutting. And though he did none of the actual work himself he carefully instructed Stephen how to cut away the uppermost layer of grasses and moss with one tool, how to cut the peat with another tool and how to lift out the pieces with a third.
[vol. II, Jonathan Strange, Chapter 42, Strange decides to write a book. June-December 1815, p. 504,506-507]
The unknown person drew closer. He was as thin as a Banbury cheese, with a hawk-like, disreputable-looking face.
[vol. III, John Uskglass, Chapter 65, The ashes, the pearls, the counterpane and the kiss, p. 797-798]

From Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen, 2012, ISBN 9781451638455):

Ivan had developed a personal metaphor for this first task (after the coffee) of the day. It was like opening one's door to find that an overnight delivery service had left a large pile of boxes on one's porch, all maeked "miscellaneous". In reality, they were all marked "Urgent!" but if everything was urgent, in Ivan's view they might as well all be labelled miscellaneous.
Each box contained one of the following: live, venemous, agitated snakes on the verge of escape; nonvenemous garden snakes; dead snakes; or things that looked like snakes but weren't, such as large, sluggish worms. It was Ivan's morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency.
[...] Desplains was possibly the sanest boss Ivan had ever worked for, and the least given to dramatics, and Ivan wished to preserve those qualities for as long as he could. Forever by preference. So every once in a while, Ivan let something trivial but amusing filter through to the admiral, just to keep up his morale, and today seemed like a good day to stick in a couple of those as well. Ivan was still looking for a few more things he could legitimately enter when Desplains blew in, collected his coffee, and murmured, "Ophidian census today, Ivan?"
"All garden variety, sir."
[...] "Meeting with Commodore Blanc and staff in thirty minutes," Ivan reminded him. "I have the agenda ready."
"Very well. Snakes aweigh."
[Chapter 5, p. 80-81]
"Baron, Baronne, haut, may I present my, um, friend, Byerly Vorrutyer." Byerly managed a tolerably noncroggled bow. "My pleasure, to be sure." Aye, By was the trained, professional liar.
[Chapter 14, p. 224]

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