He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts. - Tim Powers

Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men.

Doesn't she read chicken entrails?"
"Oh! No, astrology."
"Same sort of thing.

Weird evening," he said. "With this wind and all."
Gladhand nodded. "Several hundred years ago it was considered a valid defense in a murder trial if you could prove the Santa Ana wind was blowing when the murder was committed. The opinion was that the dry, hot wind made everybody so irritable that any murder was almost automatically excusable. Or so I've heard, anyway."
Thomas pondered it. "There might be something to that," he said.
"No," Gladhand said. "There isn't. Start sanctioning heat-of-anger crimes and you've lost the last hold on the set of conventions we call…society, civilization.