Opening lines

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."

"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."

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

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

"A voice comes to one in the dark."

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

"One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

"124 was spiteful."

"Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes."

"To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out."

"They murdered him."

"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."

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

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

"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've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne."

"November, 1997. You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead."

"I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea, by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger, long suffering also in war, until he founded a city and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people came, the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome. Muse, tell me the cause: how was she offended in her divinity. how was she grieved, the Queen of Heaven, to drive a man, noted for virtue, to endure such dangers, to face so many trials? Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?"

"You don't know about me without you have read a book called "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The Galactic Empire was dying."

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