Opening lines

"The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita."

"On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window."

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

"After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off Quinn's for an oyster supper."

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself."

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine."

"Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen."

"From a little after four o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that sight and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

"A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green."

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish."

"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army."

"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

"He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

"The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge."

"As summer wheat came ripe, so did I, born at home, on the kitchen floor."

"The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road."

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane"

"They shoot the white girl first."

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat"

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit."

"All children, except one, grow up."

"One winter night, at half past nine, Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy, I had come home, too late to dine"

"The small boys came early to the hanging."

"The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope."

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo..."

"Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust."

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

"All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities."

"The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

"My wound is geography."

"In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful."

"Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten loreWhile I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

"Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest."

"The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse."

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."

"I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte."

"I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing."

"The story so far: In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

"A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York"