Opening lines

"Gotham City. Maybe it's all I deserve, now. Maybe it's just my time in Hell."

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

"124 was spiteful."

"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills."

"RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision."

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge."

"There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker."

"The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

"Prince Rupert rode his unicorn into the Tanglewood, peering balefully through the drizzling rain as he searched half-heartedly for the flea hiding somewhere under his breastplate."

"First the colors."

"The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp."

"A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” and, in a shield, the World State's Motto: “Community, Identity, Stability”."

"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."

"I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world."

"Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity--Good."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

"I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way."

"To the east were moving waters, as far as eye could follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach. / Waters restlessly, with every motion, slipping out of used colors for new. So that each fresh wind off the lake washed the prairie grasses with used sea-colors: the prairie moved in the light like a secondhand sea. / Till between the waters and the wind came the marked-down derelicts with the dollar signs for eyes. / Looking for any prairie portage at all that hadn't yet built a jail."

"They murdered him."

"If you're going to read this, don't bother."

"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

"It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newstand, buy the evening newspaper, go outside and signal for a taxi."

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

"West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut."

"All of Gaul is divided into three parts. (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres)"

"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom."

"A voice comes to one in the dark."

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head."