Opening lines

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"It was time to whip the god."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"A screaming comes across the sky."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Harry Potter was a very unusual boy in many ways."

"It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him."

"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains."

"When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun."

"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space."

"The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods."

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

"It was a pleasure to burn."

"Barry Fairbrother did not want to go out to dinner."

"What about the teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me."

"Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all."

"Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse."

"If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn’t give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway."

"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

"By 1899 we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat."

"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story."

"In a castle of Westphalia, belonging to the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lived a youth, whom nature had endowed with the most gentle manners."

"The beginning is simple to mark."

"In a sense, I am Jacob Horner."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

"In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother at the mercy of the summer days, white from the heat and stunning."

"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

"See the Child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire."

"Elmer Gantry was drunk."