Use an ellipsis and then four asterisks to tactfully change the subject.  From The Judge, 1921.

The introduction to Puffs and Mysteries (a.k.a. A. B. Has Returned, 1855) is addressed to the "mythical multitude of readers," since few ever read prefatory matter.  "What no one thinks of reading is of course beyond criticism," so the author safely fills paper while going to very little trouble.

One of these ladies is wearing an imposter designer label.  (Insert your own "fake news" joke.  Having earned a degree in journalism, we bemoan the current degradation of the media.  Granted, the press has never in history truly been free; it has always been a propaganda engine, but traditionally there was at least a pretense of objectivity.  As La Rochefoucauld famously said, "hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue."  Now it's bare-faced bias.  Disgusting!)  From Lustige Blätter, 1917.

"The love that caught strange light from death's own eyes" —Algernon Charles Swinburne.

"A fairy palace, with a fairy garden; inside the trolls dwell, working at their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange." —Charles Kingsley

"And yet I lift my sightless face / Toward the eerie light, / And tread the lonely way we trace / Across the haunted night."  From The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell, 1905.

Here's a note to the unreal reader in a book that purports not to be real.  From Living Alone by Stella Benson, 1920.

From literary scalawag Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:

Entomologically speaking, there are antennae on an ant. But etymologically speaking, there is no ant in antennae.

From The Judge, 1920: "Behold the hole in the doughnut!  It remains the centre of distraction and you can't swallow it, hide it or give it away.  It's only a little thing but before it will give up, a man many times its size has to take off his shirt before he can make it let go."

Better late than never?  Page 174 begins, "Now that I have your attention (I hope)."  From Monsters and Magical Sticks by Steven Heller and Terry Steele.

"Some little sound of unregarded tears." —Algernon Charles Swinburne.

"The Universe is upheld solely by the law of Love" -- a facsimile of Marie Corelli's manuscript, reproduced in The Idler, 1894.

From "Ghost Gossips at Bogle Hall," in The Royal Lady's Magazine, 1831.

Here's a circular, dead black line that means not nothing but rather zero.  From Zero the Slaver by Lawrence Fletcher, 1892.

We agree -- dump all the tragedy of the book in the prologue.  From A Study in Temptations by John Oliver Hobbes, 1893.

Every castle in the air has Candles in the Sun (by William Griffith, 1921).

A ghost in the shape of the sound of a drum.  From Did You Ever See a Ghost? by Robert C. V. Meyers, 1885.

How true those words are, even today.  From Lacon by Charles Caleb Colton, 1837.