"And he came his way towards a river valley, and the bounds of the valley were forest, and on either side of the river, level meadows. And one side of the river he could see a flock of white sheep, and on the other side he could see a flock of black sheep. And as one of the white sheep bleated, one of the black sheep would come across, and would be white; and as one of the black sheep bleated, one of the white sheep would come across, and would be black. And he could see a tall tree on the river bank, and the one side of it was burning from its roots to its tip, and the other half with green leaves on it."

"Their Lord they will praise, Their speech they will keep, Their land they will lose, Except wild Walia."

"True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?"

"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 noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

"Less Bread! More Taxes!--and then all the people cheered again, and one man, who was more excited than the rest, flung his hat high into the air, and shouted (as well as I could make out) "Who roar for the Sub-Warden?" Everybody roared, but whether it was for the Sub-Warden, or not, did not clearly appear: some were shouting "Bread!" and some "Taxes!", but no one seemed to know what it was they really wanted."

"Probable-Possible, my black hen,She lays eggs in the Relative-when. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive-now. Because she's unable to Postulate how."

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure."

"For a long time I would go to bed early."

"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn."

"Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."

"Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith. Valentine Michael Smith was as real as taxes but he was a race of one."

"I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual. He didn't sound right. His footsteps fell more heavily, jauntily, and he whistled. A new guy. He whistled his way to my office door, then fell silent for a moment. Then he laughed."

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"

"Did you hear that? They've shut down the main reactor. We'll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!"

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."

"It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer."

"1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."

"It was a dark and stormy night."

"The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east."

"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife."

"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 Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home."

"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta."

"Nothing ever begins."

"The primroses were over."

"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face."

"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 as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

"Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began."

"The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse."

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes...."

"‘He's just a pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fitz Linkhorn, ‘losin' his old lady is what crazied him.’ / ‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he'd float upstream.’ / For what had embittered him Fitz had no name."

"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."

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

"Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski always gave good answers."

"It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news."

"I am the vampire Lestat."

"Where now? Who now? When now?"

"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."

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed."

"The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves."

"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 peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me"

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."

"Not every 13-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty."

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."

"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."

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."

"The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling."

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."