Epics
"Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus..."
--Homer, Iliad (760–710 BC; Butler trans.)
"Midway upon the journey of our life..."
--Dante, The Divine Comedy
"Arms, and the man I sing..."
--Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC; Dryden trans.)
Novels and Novellas
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
-- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
--Iain Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
All children, except one, grow up.
--J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911)
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
--Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell.
--Po Bronson, Bombardiers (2003)
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
--Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979)
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
-- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Mother died today. Or was it yesterday; I can't be sure.
--Albert Camus, The Stranger (1946)
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
--Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.
--Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)
For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of s** rather well.
--J.M Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)
The cold pa**ed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge Of Courage (1895)
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
--Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
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.
--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.
--George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
I am an invisible man.
--Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
--Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
--Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (1938)
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
--L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
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.
--Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man And The Sea (1952)
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.
--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
--Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (1915)
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
--Franz Kafka (trans. Breon Mitchell), The Trial (1925)
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
-– Stephen King, The Dark Tower, Episode 1: The Gunslinger
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.
--Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Raba**a), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1976)
Call me Ishmael.
--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom.
--Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
--Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
--George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
--Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
--J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
--Jean Rhys, Wide Sarga**o Sea (1966)
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.
--J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
--Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett), Anna Karenina (1877)
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
--Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
All this happened, more or less.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
--David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
--David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
--Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
--E B White, Charlotte's Web (1952)
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
The future did not arrive.
--John C Wright, Count to a Trillion(2011)
“Night falls suddenly in the tropics. The sun dives straight for the horizon, with none of the oblique angling of temperate climates. In the brief tropical twilight, darkness seems to materialize out of the very air, as if it leaked from the transparent nothingness between things…”
--Eric Zency, Panama (1995)
"When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."
--S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967)
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure of the windowpane/I was the smudge of ashen fluff -- and I/Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
--Nabakov, Pale Fire (1962)
riverrun, past Eve's 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.
--Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
Dramas
To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
--Dylan Thomas,Under Milk Wood (1954)