"One thing was certain, that the white kitten had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn't have had any hand in the mischief."

"Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while."

"I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life."

"The bench on which Dobbs was sitting was not so good."

"In my earliest memory, my grandfather is as bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers."

"Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man."

"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

"Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond."

"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive."

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

"Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan."

"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."

"Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness."

"It was just about midnight when Stenham left Si Jaffar’s door."

"There was a man and he had eight sons. Apart from that, he was nothing more than a comma on the page of History. It's sad, but that's all you can say about some people."

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."

"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 sting-taut with similes stretched to the snapping point."

"First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys."

"Its freezing - an extraordinary 0 Fahrenfeit - and its 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."

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!"

"All this happened, more or less."

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself."

"There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad."

"This is what happened."

"After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935."

"It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned."

"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: "Have they discovered evolution yet?""

"When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen."

"I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands."

"He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

"To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman."

"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'"

"...and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that"

"When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years."

"Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

"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; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me."

"Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the cornflake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastronomically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset women in front of him."

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

"In the night-time heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality."

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York"

"A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."

"The story so far: In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

"I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing."

"I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte."

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

"The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse."

"Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest."

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."