"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."

"One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister."

"Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me thought Moses Herzog."

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

"The assassin came in and ordered waffles."

"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest."

"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

"The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane."

"It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind."

"The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive."

"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 was a very unusual boy in many ways."

"Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive."

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

"'Now what I want is, Facts.'"

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

"Gabby Gomez should have seen it coming. She had been blowing on that bubble for as long as anyone could remember, and it was bound to pop sooner or later. But how could Gabby have imagined that something as sweet and as simple as one teeny, tiny little piece of bubblegum could lead to such a terribly sticky situation? Even with her parents and teachers always warning that no good would come from so much gum chewing and bubble blowing. It would be hard to believe. But then again, Gabby was far from your normal, average, everyday gum chewer. She chewed bubble gum everywhere. She chewed it here. She chewed it there. She chewed it here. She chewed gum all day. Everyday. And all night. Every night."

"The old ram stands looking down over rock slides, stupidly triumphant."

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticising any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

"A screaming comes across the sky."

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

"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."

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

"It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one."

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."

"Amergo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her."

"It was time to whip the god."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father."

"It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened."

"George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood has been chronicled in the Journal of Experimental Psychology."

"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

"It was like so, but wasn't."

"We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them."

"If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.” A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport."

"You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings."

"The Galactic Empire was dying."

"His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before."

"How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails."

"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."

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

"Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death."