Opening Sentences The First Lines of Novels Far out in the uncharted backwater of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
James Agee, A Death in the Family
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
What made me take this trip to Africa?
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.
Since before sunup Old Jack has been standing at the edge of the hotel porch, gazing out into the empty street of the town of Port William, and now the sun has risen and covered him from head to foot with light.
Wendell Berry, The Memory of old Jack
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
1801.-I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.
Charlotte Bronte, Wuthering Heights
King Babar and Queen Celeste are living happily in Celesteville, the city of the elephants, with their children Pom, Flora, and Alexander, and their cousin Arthur.
De Brunhoff, Babar and the Professor
Blackford Oakes was a good listener, but he had also developed skills at guiding any conversation in the direction he wanted to take it, including termination.
William F. Buckley, Saving the Queen
Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewary company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.
James.M. Cain, Double Indemnity
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
When Esther Jackson looked up from the stack of slick new hundred dollar bills she was counting inside the tellers' cage of the downtown branch of Angel City National Bank and glanced out the plate-glass window, the black woman inhaled sharply.
Bebe Moore Campbell, Brothers and Sisters
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.
Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no buses or trains heading in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies in the next-door town of Paradise Chapel: occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Radclif.
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
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 conversations?"
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
Carroll, Through the Looking-glass
The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.
Carson, Rachel The Edge of the Sea
I am writing this book because I understand that 'revelations' are soon to appear about that great man who was once my husband, attacking his character, and my own.
I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, disty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love.
Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, an ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for the chase.
The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim.
Raymond Chandler, The High Window
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said -- partly because I was only half-awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down.
Chandler, Playback
For forty-two years, Lewis and Benjamin Jones slept sideby side in their parents' bed, at their farm which was known as 'The Vision.'
Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill
There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds.
The Nellie , a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Only the young have such moments.
Conrad, The Shadow Line
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet.
Conrad, Lord Jim
Wait.
Conrad, Nigger of the Narcissus
It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet.
James Fennimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
"Too many!" James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.
Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
My true name is so well known in the records or registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my name or the account of my family to this work; perhaps, after my death, it may be better known; at present it would not be proper, no, not though a general pardon should be issued, even without exceptions and reserve of persons or crimes.
If an oracle told you you would be a shirtsleeve philosopher by the time you were thirty, that you would be caught in bed with a woman named Mrs. Thicknesse, have your letters used for blackmail and your wife threaten to bring suit for sixty-five dollars because that's all you were worth, you would tell him he was out of his mind.
Peter DeVries, Comfort me with Apples.
It was shortly after I became engaged to Miss Diana that I began avoiding her.
Peter DeVries
A formal party was the last place to have a ball, Mrs. Delbelly decided.
DeVries, Peckham's Marbles
Call me Ishmael. Call me anything you like.
DeVries, Vale of Laughter.
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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noiseist authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
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.
Dickens, David Copperfield
There once lived in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, a worthy gentleman, who taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason: thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.
Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Twenty-four thousand seven hundred and forty moons ago: I remember...being born."
Guido Mina di Sospiro, The story of Yew.
I sit on the bed at a crooked angle, one foot on the floor, my hip against the tent of Mom's legs, my elbows on the hospital table.
Michael Dorris,A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
They were hateful presences in me. Like a little old couple in the woods, all along for each other, the son only a whim of fate.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in 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.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day ( and still remembered among us) owing to his tragic and obscure death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again.
I am an invisible man.
By the time he was eight he knew he would never be a great actress.
Rupert Everett, Hello Darling, Are you Working?
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in a single file.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.
M.F.K.Fisher, Consider the Oyster
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.
Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
I took the battery out of my arm and fed it into the recharger, and only realized I'd done it when ten seconds later the fingers wouldn't work.
I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.
Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
Mira was hiding in the ladies' room.
Marilyn French, The Women's Room
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
Below and around where Chris Guthrie lay the June moors whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks, yellow with broom and powdered faintly with purple, that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Why, people ask me, are you writing a book about food?
Jane Goodall, Harvest for Hope.
The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring cleaning his little home.
Graham, The Wind in the Willows
The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendant's table -- the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial.
Guterson, Snow falling on Cedars
Green dice rolled across the green table, struck the rim together, and bounced back.
Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key
Once upon a cold and luminous Saturday morning, in an urban hamet of tenements, factories, and trolley cars on the western slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth.
Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
The Miller's son went and thought.
All this happened while I was wandering around Kristvania, that city no one leaves until it has left its mark on him.
Knut Hamsun, Hunger.
One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
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.
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
I get the willies when I see closed doors.
Joseph Heller, Something Happened
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
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.
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
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.
Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needle floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
Hemingway, For Whom the BellTolls
"She's trying to poison us," said Willie.
In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda.
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.
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 hadn't ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
It's freezing -- an extraordinary 0 fahrenheit -- and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik -- big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.
Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
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, Community, Identity, Stability.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the our dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
The story had held us round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.
James, The Turn of the Screw
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 names baby Tuckoo...
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Joyce, Ulysses
Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Kafka, Metamorphosis
It was late in the evening when K. arrived.
Kafka, The Castle
No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars -- bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for.
Mary Karr, Cherry.
I first met him in Piraeus.
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling at this; in other words this is the story of anunself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally,facetious won't do-just to start at the beginning and let the truth seepout, that's what I'll do-.
Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
They're out there.
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Jim Locke sets gently on the undisturbed earth a mahogany box, opens it, and takes out his transit, which looks like a spyglass.
"Thinner", the old gypsy man with the rotting nose whispers to William Halleck as Halleck and his wife walked out of the courthouse.
Summer's here. Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that fabled faded Levi's sky, the sound of kids hollering back and forth through the Bear Street Woods at the top of the hill, the tink! of Little League bats from the ballfield on the other side of the woods, the sound of powermowers, the sound of muscle-cars out on Highway 19, the sound of Rollerblades on the cement sidewalks and smooth macadam of Poplar Street, the sound of radios -- Cleveland Indians baseball (the rare day game) competing with Tina Turner belting out 'Nutbush City Limits,' the one that goes 'Twenty-five is the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it' -- and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers.
Stephen King (Richard Bachman), The Regulators
The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away.
E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways.
Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Smiley from his dubious retirement.
John Le Carre, Smiley's People
When he was nearly 13, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
It was a dark and stormy night.
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.
On a winter afternoon--a day without a sunrise, under a moon that had not set for six days--I stand on the frozen ocean 20 miles off Cape Mamen, Mackenzie King Island.
Barry, Lopez Arctic Dreams
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through it.
Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was a tunnel they were passing through and was no longer surprised at the bright sight of himself holding a yellow light over his head, peering back in.
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.
Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes.
Mildred hid the ax beneath the mattress of the cot in the dining room.
An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit.
It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.
I've seen a corpse for the first time.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Marquez, A Thousand Years of Solitude.
Call me Ishmael.
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.
Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel.
Neither destiny nor fate took me to Africa.
Farley Mowat, Woman in the Mists
It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The rue du coq d'or, Paris, seven in the morning.
Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
It must have been late autumn of that year, and probably it was towards dusk for the sake of being less conspicuous.
Charles Palliser, The Quincunx
On they went, singing "Eternal Memory," and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other's existence.
Brian Robeson stared out the window of the small plane at the endless green northern wilderness below.
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
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, has 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.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.
Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of miami.
Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Not for the first time, an argument had broken oout over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
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.
J.D.Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
When I look back, my first memories are of a large rolling meadow with a small pond.
He rode into our valley in the summer of '89.
Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears.
The most beautiful women in the world were African.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912.
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Reveille was sounded, as always, at 5 A.M. -- a hammer pounding on a rail outside camp HQ.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago?
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
In 1926 I was enrolled as student airline pilot by the Latecoere Company, the predecessors of Aeropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in south-western France, and Dakar, in French West Africa.
Antoine de St. Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
There were as many chairs there and there were two a chair that can be found everywhere a rocking chair that is to say a rocking chair can be found everywhere.
Gertrude Stein, Lucy Church Amiably
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.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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 consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; -- that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd 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.
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 my father's door.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped
My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda.
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist -- I really believe he is Antichrist -- I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you -- sit down and tell me all the news."
Tolstoy, War and Peace
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.
"Tom!"
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon.
Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
There was in Westphalia, in the castle of the Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, a young man to whom nature had given the most pleasant manners.
Yesterday I remember thinking I was the happiest girl on the earth, in the whole galaxy, in all of God's creation.
On the morning of August 8, 1965, Robert Kincaid locked the door to his small two-room apartment on the third floor of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington.
Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County
"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool's-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.
E.B.White, Stuart Little
They called him Moche the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life.
Somewhere a child began to cry.
Elie Wiesel, Dawn
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.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.
Thornton Wilder,The Bridge of San Luis Rey
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay.