From The Footprints on the Ceiling, by Clayton Rawson:
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Merlini, with all that pink lemonade running in his veins and the circus performers swinging from every branch of his family tree, reverts to type every spring.
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Miss Verrill produced half a smile. It was nice, what there was of it.
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These two uncanny examples of modern black magic are the last word in something or other.
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[Anthropomorphized Clocks dept.]
The alarm did its level best and almost failed. I heard the last tired ring just as it gave up.
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I...put my complete profane vocabulary into one blistering and very satisfying paragraph. I tacked a neat row of exclamation points on the end....
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Merlini wears no theatrical opera cape, curling mustachios, or pointed Vandyke, but somehow you feel that those hallmarks of the conjurer are there in spirit.... [His voice] propels you along an apparently sound but quite illogical path of thought, and then, with no warning, springs a trap door that leaves you standing on the sheer edge of an impossibility.
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"Commercialism rears it sordid head. Probably to introduce a new breakfast cereal called Ghost-Toasties, with testimonials from famous haunts."
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"It's screwy! It's a painting by Dali. The surrealism murder. Footprints on the ceiling! Bah! Limp watches and six-legged mutton chops! Murder in Wonderland!"
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"The crystal gazer who thinks the vision is an external reality is only a magician playing tricks on himself."
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"Found them kicking about down there." Merlini nodded in the direction of the other house. I hadn't known that articles locked in a safe could be described as kicking about but I let it pass.
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In the early history of man the professions of medicine and of magic once merged in that common ancestor, the witch doctor. Both physician and magician have inherited from him a common trait, the poker face.
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Ira Brooke came through [the door] smiling expansively, for no reason that I could see, like a Y.M.C.A. secretary with a new swimming pool.
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[Doing the Clam Math dept.]
"You know very well that a clam is twice as informative as any of those gentlemen up until chapter twenty."
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"Now I wonder what he's bumped into?"
Merlini seemed to be genuinely puzzled and not very pleased about it.
"Serves you right," I said. "Are you trying to get a corner on mysterious phone calls? I've a good notion to make one myself, just to keep you guessing."
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Medium materializes medium--a new high in something or other.
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Gavigan beamed at him indulgently and waved his hand as if he were presenting the Metropolitan Museum with two new wings, fully stocked.
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You could have dropped half a dozen pins slowly, one after the other, onto an Oriental rug and heard every one of them land.
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