The sand shelved gently here. Only at waist-level did the sudden dips occur, and then an upward-sloping hill would lead to a sand-bar, to a new shore islanded in the sea.

These so-called deadlock states are largely responsible for the failure of our attempts to solve positions in the game of Sokoban.

I have cause to weep—I must weep over my own changefulness, and over the sweetest illusions of my youth.

A holocaust of humdrum is a very vile phrase, especially when you do not mean that the humdrum is holocausted, but that it holocausts something or somebody else.