Opening lines

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us."

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

"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"

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

"Where now? Who now? When now?"

"I am the vampire Lestat."

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

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

"‘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."

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

"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!"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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