"Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten loreWhile I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

"In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful."

"My wound is geography."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

"The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette."

"All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities."

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

"Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust."

"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..."

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

"The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope."

"The small boys came early to the hanging."

"One winter night, at half past nine, Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy, I had come home, too late to dine"

"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."

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

"This time there would be no witnesses."

"All children, except one, grow up."

"As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit."

"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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat"

"They shoot the white girl first."

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane"

"The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road."

"As summer wheat came ripe, so did I, born at home, on the kitchen floor."

"The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge."

"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."

"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."

"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."

"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army."

"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."

"A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green."

"I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased."

"Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen."

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine."

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

"The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself."

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

"After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off Quinn's for an oyster supper."

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

"On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window."

"The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita."

"Call me Ishmael."

"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."

"When animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat."

"I was born in the city of Bombay ..... once upon a time."

"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."

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress."

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."