Lines from Novels BT
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
David Copperfield (1850) Charles Dickens
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) Phillip K. Dick
"On they went, singing 'Rest Eternal', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing."
Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman) Miguel de Cervantes
Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City....
Double or Nothing (1971) Raymond Federman
A screaming comes across the sky.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) Thomas Pynchon
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it 'the Riddle House,' even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) 4th book J.K. Rowling
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) J.K. Rowling
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.
Heart of Darkness (1899) Joseph Conrad
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Herzog (1964) Saul Bellow
In the land of Ingary where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of the three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.
Howl's Moving Castle Diana Wynne Jones (1986)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
I Capture the Castle (1948) Dodie Smith
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
Dune Frank Herbert
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
Earthly Powers Anthony Burgess
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.
East of Eden (1952) John Steinbeck
Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria.
Eleven Minutes Paulo Coelho
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
Elmer Gantry (1927) Sinclair Lewis
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home...
Emma jane Austen (1815)
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Ethan Frome Edith Wharton (1911)
It was a pleasure to burn.
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Ray Bradbury
"archbishop Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun."
Far from the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy (1874)
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke
"What's it going to be then, eh?" There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter basard though dry.
A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess (1962)
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole (1980)
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
A Farewell to Arms (1929) Ernest Hemingway
Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
A Frolic of His Own (1994) William Gaddis
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) James Joyce
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.
A River Runs Through It Norman Maclean
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES BY CHARLES DICKENS final line
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Charles Dickens
I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN BY MARK TWAIN final line
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Mark Twain
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, 'Holy Jesus! What are these ******* animals?'"
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson (1971)
Mister Haneda was senior to Mister Omochi, who was senior to Mister Saito, who was senior to Miss Mori, who was senior to me. I was senior to no one.
Fear and Trembling Amelie Nothomb (1999)
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.
Fever Pitch Nick Hornby (1992)
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Finnegans Wake (1939) James Joyce
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
It was like so, but wasn't.
Galatea 2.2 (1995) Richard Powers
"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."
Geek Love (1983) Katherine Dunn
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.
Go Tell It On The Mountain James Baldwin (1953)
James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.
Goldfinger Ian Fleming (1959)
Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
Gone with the Wind (1936) Margaret Mitchell
In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon...
Goodnight Moon (1947) Margaret Wise Brown
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.
Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night.
Animal Farm George Orwell
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina (1877) Leo Tolstoy
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.
As I Lay Dying (1930) William Faulkner
My mother is a fish.
As I lay Dying William Faulkner
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) Flann O'Brien
Who is John Galt?
Atlas Shrugged (1957) Ayn Rand
The play - for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper - was written by her in a two -day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.
Atonement Ian McEwan
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.
Babbitt (1922) Sinclair Lewis
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Back When We Were Grownups (2001) Anne Tyler
124 was spiteful.
Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Cat's Eye (1988) Margaret Atwood
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain..
Catch-22 (1961) Joseph Heller
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
Changing Places (1975) David Lodge
These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
Where's Papa going with that ax? said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
Charlotte's Web E.B. White (1952)
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
Chromos (1990) Felipe Alfau
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
City of Glass (1985) (1st story on The New York Trilogy) Paul Auster
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
Crash (1973) J. G. Ballard
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the Garrett in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky
On an exceptionally hot evening in early July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.
Cry, The Beloved Country Alan Paton
The great fish moved silently through the night water.
Jaws (1974) Peter Benchley
How wonderful the flavor, the aroma of her kitchen, her stories as she prepared the meal, her Christmas Rolls! I don't know why mine never turn out like hers, or why my tears flow so freely when I prepare them - perhaps I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great-aunt, who will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes.
LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE BY LAURA ESQUIVEL final line
Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this.
LITTLE WOMEN BY LOUISA MAY ALCOTT final line
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Lady Chatterley's Lover D.H. Lawrence
In the year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.
Les Miserables (1862) Victor Hugo
'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo.
Little Women Louisa May Alcott (1868-69 2 volumes)
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985)
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
Madeline Ludwig Bemelmans (1939)
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
Mansfield Park Jane Austen (1814)
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Matilda Roald Dahl (1988)
I consider it my good fortune that Fate designated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth. For this small town is situated on the border between those two German States, the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to be furthered with every means our lives long.
Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler (1925)
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Harper Lee
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.
To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Tracks (1988) Louise Erdrich
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to...
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson (It was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881 through 1882 under the title Treasure Island, or the mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883 )
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer facedown on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy on him."
White Teeth Zadie Smith
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) Jean Rhys
At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.
Wild Swans Jung Chang (1991)
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump...
Winnie-the-Pooh A. A. Milne (1926)
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) David Markson
1801-- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.
Wuthering Heights (1847) Emily Brontë
"But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find..."
Yellow Dog Martin Amis
On the far-away island of Sala-ma-Sond, Yettle the Turtle was king of the pond.
Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories Dr. Seuss (1958)
The geisha called 'Trembling Leaf,' on her knees beside James Bond, leant forward from the waist and kissed him chastely on the right cheek.
You Only Live Twice (1964) Ian Fleming
I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it's this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I'm wondering what it's going to be like in the afternoon.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM) (1974) Robert M. Pirsig
I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete...
Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis (1946)
Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you "That afternoon when I met so-and-so...was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.
Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
Middle Passage (1990) Charles Johnson
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Middlemarch (1872) George Eliot
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Middlesex (2002) Jeffrey Eugenides
"I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time."
Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
The Wings of the Dove (1902) Henry James
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Murphy (1938) Samuel Beckett
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
O, Pioneers! (1913) Willa Cather
... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
ON THE ROAD BY JACK KEROUAC final line
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
Of Mice and Men (1937) John Steinbeck
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
On the Road Jack Kerouac (1955)
"They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them."
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Gabriel García Márquez
He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
Orlando (1928) Virginia Woolf
When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.
PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER BY PATRICK SÜSKIND final line
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;
Pale Fire (1962) Vladimir Nabokov
They shoot the white girl first.
Paradise (1998) Toni Morrison
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree...
Paradise Lost (1667) John Milton
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Paul Clifford (1830) George Bulwer-Lytton
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage;
Persuasion, (1818) Jane Austen
Centuries ago there lived... 'A king!' my little readers will say immediately. No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.
Pinocchio (1883) Carlo Collodi
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen (1813)
The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per steamboat, below St. Louis.
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) Mark Twain
James Bond said: 'I've always thought that if I ever married...
Quantum of Solice Ian Fleming (1959 short story in Cosmopilitan)
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
Rabbit, Run (1960) John Updike
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...
Rebecca Daphne du Maurier (1938)
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
Riddley Walker (1980) Russell Hoban
I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull;
Robinson Crusoe (1719) Daniel Defoe
I came into aviation the hard way.
Round the Bend by Nevil Shute
She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.
STARDUST BY NEIL GAIMAN final line
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Scaramouche (1921) Raphael Sabatini
I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.
Second Skin (1964) John Hawkes
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.
Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen (1811)
I've been locked up for 264 days. I have nothing but a small notebook and a broken pen and the numbers in my head to keep me company. 1 window. 4 walls. 144 square feet of space. 26 letters in an alphabet I haven't spoken in 264 days of isolation. 6,336 hours since I've touched another human being.
Shatter Me
He lost himself a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being.
Siddhartha Herman Hesse
All this happened, more or less.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Kurt Vonnegut
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
Stranger In a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein (1961)
For a long time, I went to bed early.
Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis) Marcel Proust
But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.
THE COLOR PURPLE BY ALICE WALKER final line
She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH BY JOHN STEINBECK final line
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
THE GREAT GATSBY BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD final line
But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER BY A. A. MILNE final line A.A. Milne
Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY final line
So, if this does end up being my last letter, please believe that things are good with me, and even when they're not, they will be soon enough. And I will believe the same about you. Love always, Charlie.
THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER BY STEPHEN CHBOSKY final line
In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE BY HARUKI MURAKAMI final line
He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE final line
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy (1891)
I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city —and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Saul Bellow
On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton (1920)
The boy's name was Santiago.
The Alchemist Paulo Coelho
On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes.
The Aleph Jorge Luis Borges
I like a view, but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
The Bell Jar (1963) Sylvia Plath
The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.
The Bell Jar (final line) Sylvia Plath
First the colours. Then the humans. That's how I usually see things. Or at least, how I try. *** HERE IS A SMALL FACT *** You are going to die.
The Book Thief (2006) Markus Zusak
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman,, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
The Broom of the System (1987) David Foster Wallace
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us..
The Brothers Karammazov (1880) Fyodor Dostoevsky
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair...
The Call of the Wild (1903) Jack London
WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer (1476)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) J. D. Salinger
"I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way."
The Cement Garden Ian McEwan
You better not never tell nobody but God.
The Color Purple (1982) Alice Walker
Above the barren, sandy cape where the river joins the sea, there is a promontory or cliff rising straight up hundreds of feet to form the last outpost of land.
The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron (1968)
On the 24th of February, 1815, the lookout of Notre Dame de la Garde Signalled the three-master, the 'Pharaon' from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.
The Count of Monte Christo Alexandre Dumas (1884)
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
The Crow Road (1992) Iain M. Banks
One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Thomas Pynchon
"Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."
The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown
"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."
The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham
Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
The Debut (1981) Anita Brookner
When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
The Dick Gibson Show (1971) Stanley Elkin
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
The End of the Affair (1951) Graham Greene
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
The End of the Road (1958) John Barth
Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.
The Exorcist William Peter Blatty (1971)
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyfirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) J.R.R. Tolkien
It happened every year, was almost a ritual.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Steig Larsson
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
The Giver Lois Lowry (1993)
The past is a foreign country; the do things differently.
The Go-Between L.P. Hartley
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The Go-Between (1953) L. P. Hartley
It was Wang Lung's marriage day.
The Good Earth (1931) Pearl S. Buck
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford
To the Red Country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald
When he lies down to sleep, this landscape is always on his mind: A pine forest covers the hills, as far as the fur on a bear's back.
The Hammer of Eden Ken Follett
"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood
In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) Carson McCullers
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams (1979)
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
The Hollow Men (poem) T.S. Eliot
One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet's house to see what Piglet was doing.
The House at Pooh Corner A.A. Milne (1928)
Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass...
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,...
The Iliad
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
The Invisible Man H.G. Wells (1897)
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain."
The Island of Dr. Moreau
It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.
The Jungle Book
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day.
The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini (2004)
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.
The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
The Last Good Kiss (1978) James Crumley
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
The Life of Pi Yann Martel
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis (1950)
Once, when I was six years old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book called "True Stories", about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast.
The Little Prince Antoine de Saint Exupéry
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
The Lord of the Flies (1954) William Golding
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."
The Making of Americans (1925) Gertrude Stein
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony...
The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett (1929)
A WIDE plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.
The Mill on the Floss George Eliot (1860)
I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect - and tax - public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) Robert Heinlein
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) G. K. Chesterton,
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him.
The Talented Mr. Ripley Patricia Highsmith
THE TIME TRAVELLER (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.
The Time Machine H.G. Wells (1898)
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim) Gunter Grass
For want of a nail the kingdom was lost - that's how the catechism goes when you boil it down.
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
The Towers of Trebizond (1956) Rose Macaulay
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
The Trial (1925) Franz Kafka
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
Where now? Who now? When now?
The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles) Samuel Beckett
In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) Eric Carle,
Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
The Violent Bear it Away (1960) Flannery O'Connor,
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) C. S. Lewis
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal...
The War of the Worlds (1897) H.G. Welles
The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.
In Our Time Ernest Hemingway
It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
Intruder in the Dust (1948) William Faulkner
I am an Invisible Man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe.
Invisible Man Ralph Ellison (1952)
I am an invisible man.
Invisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
—Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
J R (1975) William Gaddis
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë (1847)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
1984 (1949) George Orwell
I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
She was one of those pretty, charming ladies, born, as if though an error of destiny, into a family of clerks.
"The Necklace" Guy de Maupassant
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?
Alices Adventures in Winderland (1865) Lewis Carroll
Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.
Alphabetical Africa Walter Abish (1974)
In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times. He laid the paper down and glanced out of the window. They were running now through Somerset. He glanced at his watch - another two hours to go.
And Then There Were None Agatha Christie (1939)
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
Black Beauty Anna Sewell (1877)
The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.
Blindness JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Psychics can see the color of time it's blue.
Blown Away (1986) Ronald Sukenick
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World State's motto...
Brave New World (1931) Aldous Huxley
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on the planet which was dying fast.
Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1973)
I will not drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week.
Bridget Jone's Diary (1996) Helen Fielding
In Westphalia, in the castle of My Lord the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, there was a young man whom nature had endowed with the gentlest of characters.
Candide (1759) Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.
Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernières (1994)
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.
I, Claudius (1934) Robert Graves
Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.
IN COLD BLOOD BY TRUMAN CAPOTE final line
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) Gilbert Sorrentino
I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house.
Kidnapped (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
Kindred Octavia E. Butler
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Lolita (1955) Vladimir Nabokov
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
Lord Jim Joseph Conrad (1900)
But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA BY ARTHUR GOLDEN final line
The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) Nathaniel West
Call me Ishmael.
Moby-Dick Herman Melville (1851)
"Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!"
Native Son Richard Wright
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Neuromancer William Gibson (1984)
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
Northanger Abbey Jane Austen (1817)
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.
The Odyssey by Homer
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
A nurse held the door open for them. Judge McKelva going first, then his daughter Laurel, then his wife Fay, they walked into the windowless room where the doctor would make his examination
The Optimist's Daughter Eudora Welty (1973)
Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.
The Origin of the Brunists (1966) Robert Coover
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home...
The Outsiders S.E. Hinton (1967)
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde (1891)
Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.
The Power and The Glory Graham Greene
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
The Princess Bride William Goldman
After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room.
The Quiet American (1955) Graham Greene
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
The Razor's Edge (1944) W. Somerset Maugham
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
The Red Badge of Courage (1895) Stephen Crane
When he woke in woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
The Road Cormac McCarthy
"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."
The Satanic Verses (1988) Salman Rushdie
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) John Barth
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
The Sound and the Fury (1929) William Faulkner
Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston.
The Stand Stephen King (1928)
Mother died today.
The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert) Albert Camus
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) Laurence Sterne
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne
My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down.
Twilight Stephenie Meyer
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Ulysses (1922) James Joyce
Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P---, in Kentucky.
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) Harriet Beecher Stowe
Good evening, London. It's nine o'clock and this is the Voice of Fate broadcasting.
V for Vendetta written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd (with additional art by Tony Weare)
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.
Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS BY EMILY BRONTË final line
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Waiting Ha Jin, (1999)
Nothing to be done.
Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett Estragon Act 1
Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
When I left my office that beautiful spring day, I had no idea what was in store for me. To begin with, everything was too perfect for anything unusual to happen. It was one of those days when a man feels good, feels like speaking to his neighbor, is glad to live in a country like ours, and proud of his government. You know what I mean, one of those rare days when everything is right and nothing is wrong.
Where the Red Fern Grows