“My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.”

“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”

“I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.”

“But you know me-I'm an information magpie, always interested in shiny bits of intel. I've never gotten in trouble because of knowing too much.”

“They're out there. First line of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.”

“Stilletos of a frozen stillicide [...] In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as 'a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop.”