“Two things attract magpies: sparkly stuff and roadkill. This particular funeral is a jackpot for magpies.”
“There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.”
“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.”
“Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.”
“Memory is a magpie after chips of colored glass and ribbon rather than the upright accuracy of objective sequence.”