Sorted by Author
Sorted by Title available here. Back to First Lines.
Author: Agee, James
Title: A Death in the Family
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived
there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
Author: Alcott, Louisa May
Title: Little Women
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled
Jo, lying on the rug.
Author: Alcott, Louisa May
Title: Little Men
"Please, sir, is this Plumfield?" asked a ragged boy of the man who opened
the great gate at which the omnibus left him.
Author: Allison, Dorothy
Title: Bastard Out of Carolina
I've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne.
Author: Angelou, Maya
Title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town,
wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - "To Whom It May Concern" -
that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California,
en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.
Author: Asimov, Isaac
Title: Foundation
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor
before.
Author: Asimov, Isaac
Title: I, Robot
I looked at my notes and I didn't like them. I'd spent three days at U.S. Robots and
might as well have spent them at home with the Encyclopedia Tellurica.
Author: Atwater, Richard and Florence
Title: Mr. Popper's Penguins
It was an afternoon in late September. In the pleasant city of Stillwater, Mr. Popper,
the house painter, was going home from work.
Author: Atwood, Margaret
Title: Cat's Eye
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Author: Austen, Jane
Title: Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Author: Austen, Jane
Title: Emma
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.
Author: Austen, Jane
Title: Persuasion
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Sommersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement,
never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and
consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect,
by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations,
arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the
almost endless creations of the last century - and there, if every other leaf were powerless,
he could read his own history with an interest that never failed - this was the page at which the
favourite volume always opened:
ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALLWalter Elliot,
born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South
Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785;
Anne, born August 9, 1787; a stillborn son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791.
Author: Böll, Heinrich
Title: The Clown
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.
Author: Baldwin, James
Title: Go Tell It to the Mountain
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his
father.
Author: Banks, Lynne Reid
Title: The Indian in the Cupboard
It was not that Omri didn't appreciate Patrick's birthday present to him.
Author: Barrie, J. M.
Title: Peter Pan
All children, except one, grow up.
Author: Barth, John
Title: Giles Goat-Boy
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.
Author: Barth, John
Title: The Sot-Weed Factor
In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools
of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more
ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly,
all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of
Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than
applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and
ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and
Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and sting-taut with similes stretched to the
snapping point.
Author: Baum, Frank
Title: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with
Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's
wife.
Author: Bellow, Saul
Title: Herzog
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me thought Moses Herzog.
Author: Bellow, Saul
Title: Humboldt's Gift
The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in Thirties was an immediate hit.
Author: Bemelmans, Ludwig
Title: Madeline
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
Author: Benchley, Peter
Title: Jaws
The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by
short sweeps of its crescent tail.
Author: Bernieres, Louis De
Title: Corelli's Mandolin
Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.
Author: Bester, Alfred
Title: The Stars My Destinaton
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying ... but
nobody thought so.
Author: Blatty, William Peter
Title: The Exorcist
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.
Author: Boyle, T. Coraghessan
Title: The Road to Wellville
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the cornflake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose,
Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastronomically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset women
in front of him.
Author: Bradbury, Ray
Title: Fahrenheit 451
It was a pleasure to burn.
Author: Bradley, Marion Zimmer
Title: Mists of Avalon
Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place; Igraine, Lady of Duke Gorlois, looked out over the sea from the headland.
Author: Brautigan, Richard
Title: A Confederate General from Big Sur
When I first heard about Big Sur I didn't know that it was a member of the Confederate
States of America.
Author: Brontë, Charlotte
Title: Jane Eyre
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Author: Brontë, Emily
Title: Wuthering Heights
1801-- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary
neighbor that I shall be troubled with.
Author: Brown, Margaret Wise
Title: Goodnight Moon
In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon.
Author: Brown, Rita Mae
Title: Venus Envy
Dying's not so bad. At least I won't have to answer the telephone.
Author: Brown, Rita Mae
Title: Rubyfruit Jungle
No one remembers her beginnings.
Author: Buck, Pearl
Title: The Good Earth
It was Wang Lung's marriage day.
Author: Bulwer-Lytton, Edward
Title: Paul Clifford
It was a dark and stormy night and 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.
Author: Bunyan, John
Title: The Pilgrim's Progress
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I
laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.
Author: Burgess, Anthony
Title: A Clockwork Orange
What's it going to be then, eh?
Author: Burnett, Frances Hodgson
Title: The Secret Garden
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most
disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
Author: Burnett, Frances Hodgson
Title: A Little Princess
Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick
and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted
and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an
odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was
driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
Author: Caldwell, Taylor
Title: Great Lion of God
"He is very ugly," said his mother.
Author: Camus, Albert
Title: The Stranger
Mother died today.
Author: Capote, Truman
Title: Breakfast at Tiffany's
I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their
neighborhoods.
Author: Capote, Truman
Title: In Cold Blood
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas,
a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there".
Author: Carroll, Lewis
Title: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister
on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had
peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no
pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book,"
thought Alice "without pictures or conversation?"
Author: Castaneda, Carlos
Title: The Teachings of Don Juan
My notes on my first session with don Juan are dated June 23,1961.
Author: Cather, Willa
Title: My Ántonia
I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plains of North America.
Author: Cervantes, Miguel de
Title: Don Quixote
At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there
lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen who are wont to keep a
lance in the rack, an old buckler, a lean horse and a swift greyhound.
Author: Chandler, Raymond
Title: The Big Sleep
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.
Author: Chesterton, G. K.
Title: The Man Who Was Thursday
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud
of sunset.
Author: Chopin, Kate
Title: The Awakening
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en!
Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!"
Author: Christie, Agatha
Title: The Mirror Crack'd
Miss Jane Marple was sitting by her window.
Author: Clarke, Arthur C.
Title: 2001: A Space Odyssey
The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of
the terrible lizards had long since ended.
Author: Clarke, Arthur C.
Title: Childhood's End
The Volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping
now for half a million years. Yet in a little while, thought Reinhold, the island
would be bathed in fires fiercer than any that had attended its birth.
Author: Clarke, Arthur C.
Title: City and the Stars
Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known
change and alteration, but now time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert's
face, but in Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came.
Author: Collins, Wilkie
Title: Woman in White
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can
achieve.
Author: Condon, Richard
Title: Prizzi's Honor
Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter was being married before the baroque altar of Santa Grazia
de Traghetto, the lucky church of the Prizzi family.
Author: Conrad, Joseph
Title: Lord Jim
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight
at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare
which made you think of a charging bull.
Author: Conrad, Joseph
Title: Heart of Darkness
Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of sails, and
was at rest.
Author: Cooper, James Fenimore
Title: The Last of the Mohicans
It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the
wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet.
Author: Crane, Stephen
Title: The Red Badge of Courage
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the
hills, resting.
Author: Dahl, Roald
Title: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket.
Author: Davies, Robertson
Title: The Cunning Man
Should I have taken the false teeth?
Author: Defoe, Daniel
Title: Robinson Crusoe
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country,
my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by
merchandise, and leaving off his trade lived afterward at York, from whence he had married
my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a good family in that country, and from
whom I was called Robinson Kreutznear; but by the usual corruption of words in England we
are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name, Crusoe, and so my companions
always called me.
Author: Deighton, Len
Title: The Ipcress File
They came through on the hot line at about half past two in the afternoon.
Author: Deighton, Len
Title: Catch a Falling Spy
"Smell that air," said Major Mann.
Author: DeLillo, Don
Title: Underworld
I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind.
Author: Dick, Phillip
Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
( Movie: Blade Runner)
Author: Dickens, Charles
Title: Tale of Two Cities
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.
Author: Dickens, Charles
Title: Great Expectations
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.
Author: Dickens, Charles
Title: The Personal History of David Copperfield
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..
Author: Dickens, Charles
Title: Hard Times
Now, what I want is Facts.
Author: Dickens, Charles
Title: A Christmas Carol
Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
Author: Doctorow, E. L.
Title: Ragtime
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle,
New York.
Author: Dos Passos, John
Title: 1919
Oh the infantree the infantree
With the dirt behind their ears
ARMIES CLASH AT VERDUN IN GLOBE'S GREATEST BATTLE
150,000 MEN AND WOMEN PARADE
but another question and a very important one is raised.
Author: Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Title: Crime and Punishment
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.
Author: Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Title: The Brothers Karamazov
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor
Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his
own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and
tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall
describe in its proper place.
Author: Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
Title: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not
infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
Author: du Maurier, Daphne
Title: The King's General
September 1653. The last of summer. The first chill winds of autumn.
Author: du Maurier, Daphne
Title: Rebecca
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.
Author: Dumas, Alexandre
Title: The Three Muskateers
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the town of Meung, in which the author of The Romance of the Rose
was born, appeared to be in a perfect state of revolution as if the Hugenots had just made a second Rochelle of it.
Author: Dumas, Alexandre
Title: The Count of Monte Cristo
On the 24th of February, 1815, the lookout of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master,
the Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding
the Chateau d'If, got on board the vessel between Cape Morgion and the Isle of Rion.
Author: Eliot, George
Title: The Mill on the Floss
A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the
loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.
Author: Eliot, George
Title: Silas Marner
In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses -- and even great ladies,
clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak -- there might be seen in
districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men,
who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
Author: Eliot, George
Title: Middlemarch
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Author: Ellison, Ralph
Title: Invisible Man
I am an invisible man.
Author: Farmer, Philip Jose
Title: To Your Scattered Bodies Go
His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him.
He had cried out, "My God, I am a dead man!"
Author: Faulkner, William
Title: The Sound and the Fury
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
Author: Faulkner, William
Title: Sanctuary
From behind the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man
drinking.
Author: Faulkner, William
Title: Go down, Moses
Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any
more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something
participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of
Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and
in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should
have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted
from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in
the land.
Author: Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Title: The Great Gatsby
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Author: Flaubert, Gustave
Title: Madame Bovary
We were in the study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the
handyman carrying a large desk.
Author: Fleming, Ian
Title: Goldfinger
James Bond, wth two double bourbons inside him, sat back in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport
and thought about life and death.
Author: Fleming, Ian
Title: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
Most motorcars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic,
and electricity and oil and gasoline and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat
last Sunday.
Author: Ford, Ford Madox
Title: The Good Soldier
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Author: Forster, E.M.
Title: A Passage to India
Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
Author: Fowles, John
Title: The French Lieutenant's Woman
An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay -- Lyme Bay being that largest byte from the underside of
England's outstretched southwestern leg -- and a person of curiousity could at once have deduced several strong
probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the
inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.
Author: Gallico, Paul
Title: The Poseidon Adventure
At seven o'clock, the morning of the 26th of December, the S.S. Poseidon, 81,000 tons,
homeward bound for Lisbon after a month-long Christmas cruise to African and South American
ports, suddenly found herself in the midst of an unaccountable swell, 400 miles south-west
of the Azores, and began to roll like a pig.
Author: Galsworthy, John
Title: The Man of Property
Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsythes have seen that charming and instructive
sight - an upper middle class family in full plumage.
Author: Gardner, John
Title: Grendel
The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
Author: Gibson, William
Title: Neuromancer
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Author: Gide, André
Title: The Fruits of the Earth
Do not hope, Nathaniel, to find God here or there - but everywhere.
Author: Gipson, Fred
Title: Old Yeller
We called him Old Yeller.
Author: Golding, William
Title: Lord of the Flies
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his
way towards the lagoon.
Author: Goldman, William
Title: The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
Author: Goldman, William
Title: Marathon Man
Everytime he drove through Yorkville, Rosenbaum got angry, just on general principles.
Author: Grahame, Kenneth
Title: The Wind in the Willows
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
Author: Grass, Günter
Title: The Tin Drum
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight;
there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a
blue-eyed type like me.
Author: Graves, Robert
Title: I, Claudius
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not
trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known
to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius",
or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius",
am now about ot write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest chilhood
and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years
ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the
"golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.
Author: Greene, Graham
Title: The Quiet American
After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat: he had said,
"I'll be with you at latest by ten," and when midnight had struck I couldn't stay
quiet any longer and went down into the street.
Author: Guterson, David
Title: Snow Falling on Cedars
The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms
placed softly on the defendents table - the posture of a man who has detached himself
insofar as this is possible at his own trial.
Author: Høeg, Peter
Title: Smilla's Sense of Snow
It's freezing - an extraordinary 0º fahrenheit - and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine
the snow is qanik - big almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of
pulverized white frost.
Author: Haggard, H. Rider
Title: She
There are some events of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seem to be graven on
the memory in such a fashion that we cannot forget them.
Author: Haggard, H.R.
Title: King Solomon's Mines
It is a curious thing that at my age, fifty-five last birthday, I should find myself taking up a
pen to try and write a history.
Author: Hailey, Arthur
Title: Airport
At half-past six on a Friday evening in January, Lincoln International
Airport, Illinois, was functioning, though with difficulty
Author: Haley, Alex
Title: Roots
Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast
of Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
Author: Hammett, Dashiell
Title: The Thin Man
I was leaning against a bar in a speak-easy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora
to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had
been sitting with three other people and came over to me.
Author: Hammett, Dashiell
Title: The Maltese Falcon
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible
v of his mouth.
Author: Hardy, Thomas
Title: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of
Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor.
Author: Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Title: The House of the Seven Gables
Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.
Author: Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Title: The Scarlet Letter
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed
with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which
was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
Author: Hegi, Ursula
Title: Stones from the River
As a child Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside of others.
Author: Heinlein, Robert
Title: Stranger in a Strange Land
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
Author: Heinlein, Robert
Title: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading
a bill to examine, license, inspect - and tax - public food vendors operating
inside municipal pressure.
Author: Heller, Joseph
Title: Catch-22
It was love at first sight.
Author: Heller, Joseph
Title: Something Happened
I get the willies when I see closed doors.
Author: Hemingway, Ernest
Title: The Old Man and the Sea
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone 84 days now
without taking a fish.
Author: Hemingway, Ernest
Title: The Sun Also Rises
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am
very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
Author: Herbert, Frank
Title: Dune
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying
about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit
the mother of the boy, Paul.
Author: Hesse, Hermann
Title: Siddharta
In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the
fig trees, Siddharta, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda.
Author: Higgins, Colin
Title: Harold and Maud
Harold Chasen stepped up on the chair and placed the noose about his neck.
Author: Hoban, Russell
Title: Ridley Walker
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly
ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time
befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
Author: Hoeg, Peter
Title: Smilla's Sense of Snow
Its freezing - an extraordinary 0 Fahrenfeit - and its snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.
Author: Hugo, Victor
Title: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
It was three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days
ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all
the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the University, and the
Town.
Author: Hugo, Victor
Title: Les Misérables
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D----
Author: Hurston, Zora Neale
Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Author: Huxley, Aldous
Title: Brave New World
A squat gray 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.
Author: Irving, John
Title: The Hotel New Hampshire
The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren't even conceived:
not Frank, the oldest; not Fanny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest
of us, Lilly and Egg.
Author: Irving, John
Title: A Prayer for Owen Meany
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.
Author: Irving, John
Title: The World According to Garp
Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding
a man in a movie theater.
Author: Jacques, Brian
Title: Redwall
Mathias cut a comical figure as he hobbled his way along the cloisters, with his large sandals flip-flopping
and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice's habit.
Author: James, Henry
Title: The Turn of the Screw
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious
remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be,
I remember no comment uttered till somebody happen to say that it was the only case he
had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.
Author: Jong, Erica
Title: Fear of Flying
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them.
Author: Joyce, James
Title: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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.
Author: Juster, Norton
Title: The Phantom Tollbooth
There was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always.
Author: Kafka, Franz
Title: Metamorphosis
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed
into a giant insect.
Author: Kennedy, William
Title: Quinn's Book
I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinn's, set eyes on Maud the
wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of the aristocrats and paupers,
just as the great courtesan Magdalena Colón, also known as La Última, a woman
whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her
across the river's icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of
Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her
role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes' gold and yielded
free to Diogenes, the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.
Author: Kerouac, Jack
Title: On the Road
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
Author: King, Stephen
Title: Cujo
Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.
Author: King, Stephen
Title: Carrie
Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the
subconscious level where savage things grow.
Author: Kingsolver, Barbara
Title: The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up
and throw Newt Hardbines's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.
Author: Kingsolver, Barbara
Title: Pigs in Heaven
Women on their own run in Alice's family.
Author: Kipling, Rudyard
Title: Kim
He sat in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun of Zam-Zammeh on her brick platform opposite the old
Ajaibgher - the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum.
Author: Kipling, Rudyard
Title: The Jungle Book
It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up
from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to
get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.
Author: Knowles, John
Title: A Separate Peace
I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.
Author: Kosinski, Jerzy
Title: The Painted Bird
In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a six year old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe
was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village.
Author: Kundera, Milan
Title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think
that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad
myth signify?
Author: L'Engle, Madeline
Title: A Wrinkle In Time
It was a dark and stormy night.
Author: Lawrence, D. H.
Title: Women In Love
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover,
working and talking.
Author: le Carré, John
Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never
have come to Thursgood's at all.
Author: le Carré, John
Title: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The American handed handed Leamas another cup of coffee and said, "Why don't you
go back and sleep? We can ring you if he shows up."
Author: le Carré, John
Title: The Honourable Schoolboy
Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London's secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin.
Author: Le Guin, Ursula
Title: Left Hand of Darkness
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld
that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Author: Le Guin, Ursula
Title: The Dispossessed
There was a wall.
Author: Lee, Harper
Title: To Kill a Mockingbird
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
Author: Levin, Ira
Title: Rosemary's Baby
Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse had signed a lease on a five-room apartment in a geometric
white house on First Avenue when they received word, from a woman named Mrs. Cortez, that a
four-room apartment in Bramford had become available.
Author: Lewis, C. S.
Title: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy.
Author: Lewis, Sinclair
Title: Main Street
This is America -- a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies
and little groves.
The town is, in our tale, called "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota." But its Main Street is the
continuation of Main Streets everywhere.
Author: Lewis, Sinclair
Title: Babbit
The tower of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and
delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.
Author: Lewis, Sinclair
Title: Elmer Gantry
Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.
Author: London, Jack
Title: The Call of the Wild
Buck did not read the newspapers or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone
for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
Author: Lovecraft, H.P.
Title: The Call Of Cthulhu
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Author: MacDonald, Betty
Title: Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
I expect I might as well begin by telling you about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle so that whenever
I mention her name, which I do very often in this book, you will not interrupt and ask,
"Who is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle?"
Author: Malamud, Bernard
Title: The Fixer
From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov
Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody
in the same direction.
Author: Mann, Thomas
Title: Buddenbrooks
"And - and - what comes next?"
"Oh, yes, yes, what the dickens does come next? C'est la question, ma très chère demoiselle!"
Frau Consul Buddenbrooks shot a glance at her husband and came to the rescure of her daughter.
Author: Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
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.
Author: Maugham, W. Somerset
Title: Of Human Bondage
The day broke gray and dull.
Author: McCloskey, Robert
Title: Make Way for Ducklings
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking for a place to live.
Author: McCollough, Colleen
Title: The First Man in Rome
Having no personal commitment to either of the new consuls, Gaius Julius Caesar and
his son simply tacked themselves onto the procession which started nearest to their
own house, the procession of the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus.
Author: McCullers, Carson
Title: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
Author: McCullough, Colleen
Title: The Thorn Birds
On December 8th, 1915, Meggie Cleary had her fourth birthday.
Author: McCullough, Colleen
Title: Caesar's Women
"Brutus, I don't like the look of your skin. Come here to the light, please."
Author: McKenna, Richard
Title: The Sand Pebbles
"Hello, ship" Jake Holman said under his breath.
Author: McMillan, Terry
Title: Waiting to Exhale
Right now I'm supposed to be all geeked up because I'm getting ready for a New Year's
Eve party that some guy named Lionel invited me to.
Author: McMurtry, Larry
Title: Terms of Endearment
"The success of a marriage invariably depends on the woman," Mrs. Greenway
said.
Author: Melville, Herman
Title: Moby Dick
Call me Ishmael.
Author: Metalious, Grace
Title: Peyton Place
Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases
so that one in never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.
Author: Michener, James A.
Title: The Source
On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five
days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas
rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane,
"If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn.
Author: Miller Jr., Walter
Title: A Canticle for Leibowitz
Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents,
had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who had appeared during that young
novice's Lenten fast in the desert
Author: Miller, Henry
Title: Tropic of Cancer
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere nor a chair misplaced. We are alone here
and we are dead.
Author: Mitchell, Margaret
Title: Gone with the Wind
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when
caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
Author: Montgomery, Lucy Maud
Title: Anne of Green Gables
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main
road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders
and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its
source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place;
it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its
earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of
pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's
Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not
even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door
without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably
was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window,
keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks
and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or
out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted
out the whys and wherefores thereof.
Author: Morrison, Toni
Title: Sula
In that place, where they tore the night shade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the
Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighrborhood.
Author: Morrison, Toni
Title: Beloved
124 was spiteful.
Author: Nabokov, Vladimir
Title: Lolita
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loin.
Author: Naylor, Gloria
Title: The Women of Brewster Place
Brewster Place was the bastard child of several clandestine meetings between the
alderman of the sixth district and the managing director of the Unico Realty Company.
Author: Niven, Larry
Title: Ringworld
In the night time heat of Beirut in one of a row of general address transfer booths,
Louis Wu flicked into reality.
Author: O'Connor, Flannery
Title: The Violent Bear It Away
Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy
got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had
come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast
table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with
the sign of its Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep
the dogs from digging it up.
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Title: Bellefleur
It was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before Germaine's
birth (nearly twelve months before her birth), on a night in late September stirred by innumerable
frenzied winds, like spirits contending with one another - mow plaintively, now angrily,
now with a subtle cellolike delicacy capable of making the flesh rise on one's arms and
neck - a night so sulfurous, so restless, so swollen with inarticulate longing that
Leah and Gideon Bellefleur in their enormous bed quarreled once again, brought to tears
because their love was too ravenous to be contained by their mere mortal bodies; and
their groping, careless, anguished words were like strips or raw silk rubbed violently
together (for each was convince the other did not, could not, be equal to his love -
Leah doubted that any man was capable of a love so profound it could be silent, like
a forest pond; Gideon doubted that any woman was capable of comprehending the nature of a man's
passion, which might tear through him, rendering him broken and exhausted, as vulnerable
as a smalll child): it was on this tumultuous rain-lashed night that Mahalaleel came to
Bellefleur Manor on the western shore of the great Lake Noir, where he was to stay for
nearly five years.
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Title: Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
"Little Red" Garlock, sixteen years old, skull smashed soft as a rotted
pumpkin and body dumped into the Cassadaga River near the foot of Pitt Street, must
not have sunk as deep as he'd been intended to sink, or floated as far.
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Title: Expensive People
I was a child murderer.
Author: Ondaatje, Michael
Title: The English Patient
She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.
Author: Orwell, George
Title: 1984
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Author: Pasternak, Boris
Title: Doctor Zhivago
On they went, singing "Rest Eternal," and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind
seemed to carry on their singing.
Author: Paterson, Katherine
Title: Bridge to Terabithia
Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity --- Good.
Author: Piercy, Marge
Title: Small Change
Beth was looking in the mirror of her mother's vanity.
Author: Piper, Watty
Title: The Little Engine that Could
Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong
Author: Plath, Sylvia
Title: The Bell Jar
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was
doing in New York.
Author: Pohl, Frederik
Title: Gateway
My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male.
Author: Porter, Katherine Anne
Title: Ship of Fools
August, 1931 - The port town of Veracruz is a little purgatory between land and
sea for the traveler, but the people who live there are very fond of themselves and
the town they have helped to make.
Author: Portis, Charles
Title: True Grit
People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off
in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although
I will say it did not happen every day.
Author: Potok, Chaim
Title: The Chosen
For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks
of each other and neither of us knew of the others existence.
Author: Proulx, E. Annie
Title: The Shipping News
Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.
Author: Puzo, Mario
Title: The Godfather
Amerigo 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.
Author: Pynchon, Thomas
Title: Gravity's Rainbow
A screaming comes across the sky.
Author: Rölvaag, O. E.
Title: Giants in the Earth
Bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon.
Author: Rand, Ayn
Title: Atlas Shrugged
Who is John Galt?
Author: Remarque, Erich Maria
Title: All Quiet on the Western Front
We are at rest five miles behind the front.
Author: Renault, Mary
Title: The King Must Die
The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers.
Author: Rey, H.A.
Title: Curious George
This is George. He lived in Africa.
Author: Robbins, Tom
Title: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Amoebae leave no fossils.
Author: Robbins, Tom
Title: Jitterbug Perfume
The beet is the most intense of vegetables.
Author: Robbins, Tom
Title: Still Life with Woodpecker
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was
declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the
world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting - with various
combinations of dread, hope, and ennui - for something momentous to occur.
Author: Robinson, Marilynne
Title: Housekeeping
My name is Ruth. I grew up with my sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster,
and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter,
Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.
Author: Roth, Philip
Title: Portnoy's Complaint
She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school
I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
Author: Roy, Arundhati
Title: The God of Small Things
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.
Author: Rushdie, Salman
Title: The Satanic Verses
"To be born again " sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first
you have to die."
Author: Salinger, J.D.
Title: The Catcher in the Rye
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.
Author: Schaefer, Jack
Title: Shane
He rode into our valley in the summer of '89.
Author: Segal, Erich
Title: Love Story
What can you say about a 25 year old girl who died?
Author: Selden, George
Title: The Cricket in Times Square
A mouse was looking at Mario.
The mouse's name was Tucker, and he was sitting in the opening of an abandoned drain
pipe in the subway station at Times Square.
Author: Sewell, Anna
Title: Black Beauty
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow
with a pond of clear water in it.
Author: Shaw, Irwin
Title: Rich Man, Poor Man
Mr. Donnelly, the track coach, ended the day's practice early because Henry Fuller's
father came down to the high-school field to tell Henry that they had just got a telegram from
Washington announcing that Henry's brother had been killed in action in Germany.
Author: Shelley, Mary
Title: Frankenstein
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement
of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Author: Sholokhov, Mikhail
Title: And Quiet Flows the Don
The Melekhov farm was right at the end of the Tatarsk village. The gate of the cattle-yard opened northward towards
the Don.
Author: Simak, Clifford
Title: City
Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine
seep into his bones.
Author: Simak, Clifford
Title: Way Station
The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin gray wisps of fog above the
tortured earth and the shattered fences and peach trees that had been whittled into
toothpicks by cannon fire.
Author: Singer, Isaac Bashevis
Title: Shosha
I was brought up on three dead languages - Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish (some consider the last not
a language at all) - and in a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud.
Author: Smiley, Jane
Title: A Thousand Acres
At sixty miles an hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.
Author: Smith, Betty
Title: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.
Author: Smith, Dodie
Title: 101 Dalmatians
Not long ago, there lived in London a young married couple of Dalmatian
dogs named Pongo and Misses Pongo.
Author: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
Title: The Gulag Archipelago
How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago?
Author: Sontag, Susan
Title: Death Kit
Diddy the Good was taking a business trip.
Author: Spencer, Scott
Title: Endless Love
When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands,
I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved - I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was
hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably.
Author: Steinbeck, John
Title: Of Mice and Men
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green.
Author: Steinbeck, John
Title: Cannery Row
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem , a stink, a grating noise, a quality
of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
Author: Steinbeck, John
Title: The Pearl
Kino awakened in the near dark.
Author: Steinbeck, John
Title: The Grapes of Wrath
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.
Author: Stevenson, Robert Louis
Title: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a
smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long,
dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.
Author: Stevenson, Robert Louis
Title: Kidnapped
I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning
early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took
the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house.
Author: Stevenson, Robert Louis
Title: Treasure Island
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen
having asked me to write down the whole particulars about
Treasure island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back
but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still
treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17 - , and
go back to the time when my father kept the `Admiral Benbow'
inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his
lodging under our roof.
Author: Stewart, Mary
Title: The Crystal Cave
I am an old man now, but then I was already past my prime when Arthur was crowned King.
Author: Stoker, Bram
Title: Dracula
3 May. Bistritz. - Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna
early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but the train was an hour late.
Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got from the train
and the little I could walk through the streets.
Author: Stout, Rex
Title: The Hand in Glove
It was not surprising that Sylvia Raffray, on that Saturday in September, had
occasion for discourse with various men, none of them utterly ordinary, and with one remarkable
young woman; it was not surprising that all this happened without any special effort
on Sylvia's part, for she was rich, personable to an extreme, an orphan, and six months
short of twenty-one years.
Author: Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Title: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two
gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished
dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky.
Author: Sturgeon, Theodore
Title: More Than Human
The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of
hunger and the flickering of fear.
Author: Styron, William
Title: The Confessions of Nat Turner
TO THE PUBLIC - The late insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind and led to a
thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports.
Author: Tan, Amy
Title: The Hundred Secret Senses
My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes.
Author: Tan, Amy
Title: The Joy Luck Club
My father asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club.
Author: Thackery, William Makepeace
Title: Vanity Fair
While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June,
there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies,
on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven
by a fat coachman in a three cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.
Author: Theroux, Paul
Title: The Mosquito Coast
We drove past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five miles into
Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the awfulness of America - how
it got turned into a dope-taking, door locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers
and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks.
Author: Thoreau, Henry David
Title: Walden
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I
lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house
which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
Author: Thurber, James
Title: The Thirteen Clocks
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't
go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his neice, the Princess Saralinda.
Author: Tolkien, J.R.R.
Title: The Hobbit
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Author: Tolstoy, Leo
Title: Anna Karenina
All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after
its own fashion.
Author: Tolstoy, Leo
Title: War and Peace
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the
Buonapartes."
Author: Travers, P.L.
Title: Mary Poppins
If you want to find Cherry Tree Lane all you have to do is ask a policeman at the crossroads.
Author: Twain, Mark
Title: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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.
Author: Twain, Mark
Title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
"TOM!"
Author: Tyler, Anne
Title: Breathing Lessons
Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania.
Author: Undset, Sigrid
Title: Kristin Lavransdatter
When the lands and goods of Ivar Gjesling the younger, of Sundbu, were divided after his death in 1306,
his lands in Sil of Gudbrandsdal fell to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Lavrans Björngulfsön.
Author: Updike, John
Title: Rabbit, Run
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a blackboard bolted to it.
Author: Updike, John
Title: Rabbit Redux
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant,
blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging
to them.
Author: Updike, John
Title: Rabbit Is Rich
Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty
windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111,
traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be.
Author: Updike, John
Title: Rabbit at Rest
Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional
Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's
floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their
two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped
vaguely like an airplane.
Author: Uris, Leon
Title: Exodus
The airplane plip-plopped down the runway to a halt before the big sign: WELCOME TO CYPRUS.
Author: Vidal, Gore
Title: Myra Breckinridge
I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.
Author: Vidal, Gore
Title: Lincoln
Elihu B. Washburne opened his gold watch.
Author: Vidal, Gore
Title: Creation
I am blind. But I am not deaf. Becuase of the incompleteness of my misfortune,
I was obliged yesterday to listen for nearly six hours to a self-styled historian
whose account of what the Athenians call "the Persian Wars" was nonsense
of a sort that were I less old and more privileged, I would have risen in my seat
at the Odeon and scandalized all Athens by answering him.
Author: Voltaire,
Title: Candide
In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble
Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom Nature had endowed
with a most sweet disposition.
Author: Vonnegut, Kurt
Title: Cat's Cradle
Call me Jonah.
Author: Vonnegut, Kurt
Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
All this happened, more or less.
Author: Vonnegut, Kurt
Title: Breakfast of Champions
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet
which was dying fast.
Author: Vonnegut, Kurt
Title: Slapstick
To whom it may concern: It is springtime.
Author: Walker, Alice
Title: Possessing the Secret of Joy
I did not realize for a long time that I was dead.
Author: Walker, Alice
Title: The Color Purple
You better not never tell nobody but God.
Author: Waller, Robert
Title: The Bridges of Madison County
On the morning of August 8, 1965, Robert Kincaid locked the door to his small
two-room apartment on the third floor of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington.
Author: Warren, Robert Penn
Title: A Place to Come To
I was the only boy, or girl either, in the public school in the town of Dugton,
Claxford County, Alabama, whose father had ever got killed in the middle of the
night standing up in the front of his wagon to piss on the hindquarters of one of
a span of mules and, being drunk, pitching forward on his head, still hanging onto his dong, and hitting the pike in such a position and condition that both the left front and left rear wheels of the wagon rolled, with perfect precision, over his
unconscious neck, his having passed out being, no doubt, the reason he took the fatal plunge in the first place.
Author: Waugh, Evelyn
Title: Brideshead Revisted
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and
looked back at the camp, just coming into full view before me through the grey
mist of early morning
Author: Wells, H.G.
Title: The Island of Doctor Moreau
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady
Vain."
Author: Wells, H.G.
Title: The Time Machine
The Time Traveler (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter
to us.
Author: Wells, H.G.
Title: The War of the Worlds
No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly
and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their
various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps
almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scru-
tinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a
drop of water.
Author: Welsh, Irvine
Title: Trainspotting
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he is trembling.
Author: Welty, Eudora
Title: The Optimist's Daughter
A nurse held the door open for them. Judge McKelva going first, then his daughter
Laurel, then his wife Fay, they walked into the windowless room where the doctor
would make his examination.
Author: Wharton, Edith
Title: Ethan Frome
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Author: White, E.B.
Title: Charlotte's Web
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they
were setting the table for breakfast.
Author: White, E.B.
Title: Stuart Little
When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much
bigger than a mouse.
Author: Wibberley, Leonard
Title: The Mouse That Roared
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick lies in a precipitous fold of the northern Alps and
embraces in its tumbling landscape portions of three valleys, a river, one complete
mountain with an elevation of two thousand feet and a castle.
Author: Wilde, Oscar
Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the
trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate
perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Author: Wilder, Thorton
Title: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all
Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
Author: Wolfe, Thomas
Title: You Can't Go Home Again
It was the hour of twilight on a soft spring day toward the end of April in the year
of Our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window
and looked out at what he could see of New York.
Author: Wolfe, Thomas
Title: Look Homeward, Angel
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvannia, and
thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of the angel, is touched by
that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Author: Woolf, Virginia
Title: Orlando
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.
Author: Wouk, Herman
Title: The Winds of War
Commander Victor Henry rode a taxi-cab home from the Navy building on Constitution Avenue, in a
gusty gray March rainstorm that matched his mood.
Author: Wright, Richard
Title: Native Son
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room.
A bed spring creaked. A womans' voice sang out impatiently: "Bigger, shut that thing
off!"
Author: Wyss, Johann
Title: The Swiss Family Robinson
For many days we had been tempest-tossed.
Author: Zelazny, Roger
Title: Lord of Light
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the
Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.
Total number of titles is: 308
To Top