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| Books in database: 3164 | ||||||||
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| Louis L'Amour | ||||
| Hondo | He rolled the cigarette in his lips, liking the taste of the tobacco, squinting his eyes against the sun glare. His buckskin shirt, seasoned by sun, rain, and sweat, smelled stale and old. His jeans had long since faded to a neutral color that lost itself against the desert. | Buy | ||
| Jubal Sackett | A cold wind blew off Hanging Dog Mountain and I had no fire, nor dared I strike so much as a spark that might betray my hiding place. Somewhere near, an enemy lurked, waiting. | Buy | ||
| Last of the Breed | Major Joe Makatozi stepped into the sunlight of a late afternoon.
The first thing he must remember was the length of the days at
this latitude. His eyes moved left and right. About three hundred yards long, a hundred yards wide, three guard towers to a side, two men in each. A mounted machine gun in each tower. Each man armed with a submachine gun. | Buy | ||
| Sackett’s Land | It was my devil's own temper that brought me to grief, my temper and a skill with weapons born of my father's teaching. | Buy | ||
| The Lonesome Gods | I sat very still, as befitted a small boy among strangers,
staring wide-eyed into a world I did not know. I was six years old and my father was dying. Only last year I had lost my mother. | Buy | ||
| Madeline L'Engle | ||||
| A Wrinkle In Time | It was a dark and stormy night | Buy | ||
| Pierre Choderlos de Laclos | ||||
| Dangerous Liaisons | LETTER I: Cecile de Volanges to Sophie Carnay at the Ursuline
Convent of ----- You see my dear Sophie I am keeping my word. Frills and furbelows do not take up all my time; there will always be some left over for you. Nonetheless, I have seen more frippery in the course of this one day than I did in all the four years we spent together; and I think our fine Tanville is going to be more mortified by my next visit to the convent (when I shall certainly ask to see her) than she could ever have hoped we were by all those visits of hers to us en grande tenue. | Buy | ||
| Wally Lamb | ||||
| I Know This Much Is True | On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. | Buy | ||
| She's Come Undone | In one of my earliest memories, my mother and I are on the front porch of our rented Carter Avenue house watching two delivery men carry our brand-new television set up the steps. I'm excited because I've heard about but never seen television. | Buy | ||
| Anne Lamott | ||||
| Operating Instructions | I woke up with a state at 4:00 one morning and realized that I very, very pregnant. Since I had conceived six months earlier, one might have thought that the news would have sunk in before then, and in many ways it had, but it was on that early morning in May that I first realized how severely pregnant I was. | Buy | ||
| Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | ||||
| The Leopard | Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. | Buy | ||
| Elinor Macartney Lane | ||||
| Katrine | Ravenel Plantation occupies a singular rise of wooded land in North Carolina, between Way-Home River, Loon Mountain, and the Silver Fork. | Buy | ||
| Adria Locke Langley | ||||
| A Lion Is in the Streets | For two days, ever since Hank's death, she had been in a daze of numbness, held in a strange waiting on some inner knowledge. | Buy | ||
| Terrill Lankford | ||||
| Angry Moon | "Tequila", the stranger said with a wicked grin. | Buy | ||
| Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre | ||||
| The Fifth Horseman | The rain, the bitter rain of winter, flayed the window with its silken lash, sending jagged rivulets coursing down its plate-glass surface. The man peered out, across the empty canyons, into the black recesses of the night. He shuddered. | Buy | ||
| The Fifth Horseman | The unseasonably cold December day drew to a close. Mounds of still-fresh snow, the heritage of the unexpected storm which had swept up the eastern seaboard seventy two hours before, lined the streets of the nation's capital. That snow, and the freezing weather which had followed it, had kept most of the city's 726,000 inhabitants indoors this Sunday afternoon, December 13. | Buy | ||
| Ring Lardner | ||||
| Champion | Midge Kelly scored his first knockout when he was seventeen. The knockee was his brother Connie, three years his junior and a cripple. | Buy | ||
| Jonathan Latimer | ||||
| Black Is the Fashion for Dying | He first heard the sound somewhere around quarter to eleven. | Buy | ||
| Headed for a Hearse | In the cell to the right, a man was still crying. | Buy | ||
| Murder in the Evening | It was nearly evening. | Buy | ||
| Red Gardenias | 'There's a burglar downstairs,' Ann Fortune said. | Buy | ||
| The Search for my Great-Uncle's Head | With a hollow rattle of its muffler the Greyhound bus disappeared down the cement road and left me in the darkness. | Buy | ||
| D H Lawrence (Also known as: ) | ||||
| Lady Chatterley | Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter now many skies have fallen. | Buy | ||
| Sons and Lovers | "The Bottoms" succeed to "Hell Row." Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brook-side on Greenhill Lane. | Buy | ||
| The Rainbow | The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. | Buy | ||
| The White Peacock | I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill-pond | Buy | ||
| Women in Love | Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-day of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. | Buy | ||
| George Alfred Lawrence | ||||
| Guy Livingstone | It is not a pleasant epoch in one's life--the first forty-eight hours at a large public school. I have known strong-minded men of mature age confess that they never thought of it without a shiver. I don't count the home-sickness, which perhaps only affects, seriously, the most innocent debutants, but there are other thousand-and-one little annoyances which make up a great trouble. | Buy | ||
| Thomas Edward Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") | ||||
| Revolt in the Desert | When at last we anchored in Jeddah's outer harbour, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. | Buy | ||
| Seven Pillars of Wisdom | Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. | Buy | ||
| Mary Lawson | ||||
| Crow Lake | When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn't until long afterward that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. | Buy | ||
| Crow Lake | My great-grandmother Morrison fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. | Buy | ||
| John Le Carré | ||||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| 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." | Buy | ||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| Ursula Le Guin | ||||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| The Dispossessed | There was a wall. | Buy | ||
| David Leavitt | ||||
| The Page Turner | "Paul! Let me fix your tie!" | Buy | ||
| Harper Lee | ||||
| To Kill a Mockingbird | When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. | Buy | ||
| Laurie Lee | ||||
| Cider with Rosie | I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. | Buy | ||
| Denis Lehane | ||||
| A Drink before Dawn | My earliest memories involve fire. | Buy | ||
| A Drink Before the War | My earliest memories involve fire. | Buy | ||
| Darkness Take My Hand | When I was a kid, my father took me up on the roof of a freshly burned building. | Buy | ||
| Sacred | A piece of advice: If you ever follow someone in my neighborhood, don't wear pink. | Buy | ||
| Fritz Leiber | ||||
| Conjure Wife | Norman Saylor was not the sort of man to go prying into his wife's dressing room. | Buy | ||
| Swords in the Mist | Muffled drums beat out a nerve-scratching rhythm and red lights flickered hypnotically in the underground Temple of Hates, where five thousand ragged worshippers knelt and abased themselves and ecstatically pressed foreheads against the cold and gritty cobbles as the trance took hold and the human venom rose in them. | Buy | ||
| Elmore Leonard | ||||
| Freaky Deaky | Chris Mankowski's last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got a call to dispose of a bomb. | Buy | ||
| Pagan Babies | The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones had been carried off by scavenging dogs. | Buy | ||
| Valdez Is Coming | Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and pines higher up. | Buy | ||
| Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov | ||||
| A Hero of Our Time | I was travelling post from Tiflis. All the luggage I had in my cart consisted of one small portmanteau half filled with travelling-notes on Georgia; of these the greater part has been lost, fortunately for you; but the portmanteau itself and the rest of its contents have remained intact, fortunately for me. | Buy | ||
| Doris Lessing | ||||
| The Golden Notebook | The two women were alone in the London flat. | Buy | ||
| Jonathan Allen Lethem | ||||
| Motherless Brooklyn | Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. | Buy | ||
| Charles James Lever | ||||
| Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon | The rain was dashing in torrents against the window-panes, and the wind sweeping in heavy and fitful gusts along the dreary and deserted streets, as a party of three persons sat over their wine, in that stately old pile which once formed the resort of the Irish Members, in College Green, Dublin, and went by the name of Daly's Clubhouse. | Buy | ||
| Ira Levin | ||||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| Meyer Levin | ||||
| Compulsion | Nothing ever ends. | Buy | ||
| C S Lewis | ||||
| A Grief Observed | No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. | Buy | ||
| Out Of The Silent Planet | The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortable on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road. | Buy | ||
| Perelandra | 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. | Buy | ||
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy. | Buy | ||
| The Screwtape Letters | My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. | Buy | ||
| The Voyage of the Dawn Treader | There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. | Buy | ||
| Sinclair Lewis | ||||
| Ann Vickers | Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play. | Buy | ||
| Arrowsmith | The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. | Buy | ||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| Cass Timberlane | Until Jinny Marshland was called to the stand, the Judge was deplorably sleepy. | Buy | ||
| Dodsworth | The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Keenpoose Canoe Club. | Buy | ||
| Elmer Gantry | Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. | Buy | ||
| It Can't Happen Here | The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club. | Buy | ||
| Kingsblood Royal | Mr. Blingham, and may he fry in his own cooking-oil, was assistant treasurer of the Flaver-Saver Company. | Buy | ||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| Main Street | On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. | Buy | ||
| Work of Art | The flat roof of the American House, the most spacious and important hotel in Black Thread Center, Connecticut, was lined with sheet of red-painted tin, each embossed with "Phoenix, the Tin of Kings." | Buy | ||
| Ted Lewis | ||||
| Get Carter | The rain rained. | Buy | ||
| Alan Lightman | ||||
| Einstein's Dreams | Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. | Buy | ||
| Jill Limber | ||||
| Come What May | "Young lady, you could be the answer to my prayers." General Allen pointed to Amanda Giles' bodice. "But we'll have to do something about those." | Buy | ||
| The 151b. Matchmaker | Today might qualify as theworst day of Jolie Carleton's life. | Buy | ||
| Joseph Crosby Lincoln | ||||
| The Portygee | Overhead the clouds cloaked the sky; a ragged cloak it was, and, here and there, a star shone through a hole, to be obscured almost instantly as more cloud tatters were hurled across the rent. | Buy | ||
| Anne Morrow Lindbergh | ||||
| Dearly Beloved | Dearly beloved--late again! | Buy | ||
| Charles A. Lindbergh | ||||
| The Spirit of St. Louis | Night already shadows the eastern sky. To my left, low on the horizon, a thin line of cloud is drawing on its evening sheath of black. A moment ago, it was burning red and gold. | Buy | ||
| Reeve Lindbergh | ||||
| Under a Wing | In kindergarten, one of my brothers told a friend on the playground that our father had discovered America. At about the same age, I dreamed that he was God. | Buy | ||
| Charles de Lint | ||||
| Greenmantle | Frankie followed the moving van down the short driveway and watched it head off down the road; then she turned to look at the house. The difference between the half-gutted structure that had stood there when she bought the place and what was there now was phenomenal. | Buy | ||
| Greenmantle | MALTA, AUGUST 1983 By the time Eddie "the Squeeze" Pinelli was five hours dead, Valenti was on a Boeing 747 halfway across the Atlantic. He sipped the beer that the steward had brought him and stared out the window into the darkness. | Buy | ||
| Memory and Dream | September 1992 Katharine Mully had been dead for five years and two months, the morning Isabelle received the letter from her. | Buy | ||
| Moonheart | Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. | Buy | ||
| Mulengro | Janfri Yayal watched his house burn down without expression. | Buy | ||
| Someplace to Be Flying | Newford, Late August 1996 The streets were still wet but the storm clouds had moved on as Hank drove south on Yoors waiting for a fare. Inhabited tenements were on his right, the derelict blight of the Tombs on his left, Miles Davis's muted trumpet snaking around Wayne Shorter's sax on the tape deck. The old Chev four-door didn't look like much; painted a flat gray, it blended into the shadows like the ghost car it was. | Buy | ||
| The Little Country | There were two things Janey Little loved best in the world: music and books, and not necessarily in that order. | Buy | ||
| Trader | If dreams can be portents of what is to come, then I had my fair share if forewarning before my life was stolen away. | Buy | ||
| Yarrow | Old ghosts lived behind Cat Midhir's eyes, memories that had no home until they came to haunt her. | Buy | ||
| E. Lynn Linton | ||||
| The Atonement of Leam Dundas | To those who admire the kind of thing that it was, North Aston was one of the loveliest places to be found in England. | Buy | ||
| Frances Little (pseudonym of Fannie Macaulay) | ||||
| The Lady of the Decoration | San Francisco, July 30, 1901 My dearest Mate: Behold a soldier on the eve of battle! I am writing this in a stuffy little hotel room and I don't dare stop whistling for a minute. You could cover my courage with a postage stamp. In the morning I sail for the Flowery Kingdom, and if the roses are waiting to strew my path it is more than they have done here for the past few years. | Buy | ||
| Richard Llewellyn | ||||
| How Green Was My Valley | I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am gong from the Valley. | Buy | ||
| William John Locke | ||||
| Jaffery | I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend Jaffery Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following account of that dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say that I have been egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. | Buy | ||
| Septimus | "I love Nunsmere," said the Literary Man from London. "It is a spot where faded lives are laid away in lavender." | Buy | ||
| Simon the Jester | I met Renniker the other day at the club. He is a man who knows everything--from the method of trimming a puppy's tail for a dog-show, without being disqualified, to the innermost workings of the mind of every European potentate. If I want information on any subject under heaven I ask Renniker. | Buy | ||
| The Fortunate Youth | Paul Kegworthy lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather, Mr. Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred similar streets in a northern manufacturing town. Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked in factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a reputation for holiness. | Buy | ||
| The Red Planet | "Lady Fenimore's compliments, sir, and will you be so kind as to step round to Sir Anthony at once?" | Buy | ||
| Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr | ||||
| Raintree County | Yes, sir, here's the Glorious Fourth again. | Buy | ||
| David Lodge | ||||
| Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses | High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. | Buy | ||
| Home Truths | The cottage stands all on its own at the end of a rutted cart-track that leads off from the main road to the village, about a mile away. | Buy | ||
| Small World | "April is the cruellest month", Persee McGarrigle quoted silently to himself, gazing through the grimy windowpanes at the unseasonable snow crusting the lawns and flowerbeds of the Rummidge campus. | Buy | ||
| The British Museum is Falling Down | It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about. | Buy | ||
| Jack London | ||||
| The Star Rover [1914] (ch. 1), (also titled The Jacket | All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me. Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming--ay, of forming and forgetting. | Buy | ||
| Before Adam | Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed. | Buy | ||
| Hearts of Three | Events happened very rapidly with Francis Morgan that late spring morning. | Buy | ||
| Iron Heel | The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems unreal. All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears, and all my senses, for some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it may not be premature! That it may not be premature! | Buy | ||
| Jerry of the Islands | Not until Mister Haggin abruptly picked him up under one arm and stepped into the sternsheets of the waiting whaleboat, did Jerry dream that anything untoward was to happen to him. | Buy | ||
| Martin Eden | The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap | Buy | ||
| Martin Eden | The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in which he found himself. He did not know what to do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him. The act was done quietly and naturally, and the awkward young fellow appreciated it. "He understands," was his thought. "He'll see me through all right." | Buy | ||
| Michael, Brother of Jerry | But Michael never sailed out of Tulagi, nigger-chaser on the Eugenie. | Buy | ||
| Smoke Bellew | In the beginning he was Christopher Bellew. By the time he was at college he had become Chris Bellew. Later, in the Bohemian crowd of San Francisco, he was called Kit Bellew. And in the end he has known by other name than Smoke Bellew. | Buy | ||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| The People of the Abyss | "But you can't do it, you know," friends said, to whom I applied for assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of London. "You had better see the police for a guide," they added, on second thought, painfully endeavoring to adjust themselves to the psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better credentials than brains. | Buy | ||
| The Scarlet Plague | The way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. | Buy | ||
| The Sea Wolf | I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth's credit. | Buy | ||
| The Valley of the Moon | "You hear me, Saxon? Come on along. What if it is the Bricklayers'? I'll have gentlemen friends there, and so'll you. The Al Vista band'll be along, an' you know it plays heavenly. An' you just love dancin'--" | Buy | ||
| White Fang | Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. | Buy | ||
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | ||||
| Evangeline | THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the
hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. | Buy | ||
| The Courtship of Miles Standish | In the Old Colony days, in Plymouth the land of the Pilgrims, To and fro in a room of his simple and primitive dwelling, Clad in doublet and hose, and boots of Cordovan leather, Strode, with a martial air, Miles Standish the Puritan Captain. Buried in thought he seemed, with his hands behind him, and pausing Ever and anon to behold his glittering weapons of warfare, Hanging in shining array along the walls of the chamber,-- Cutlass and corselet of steel, and his trusty sword of Damascus, Curved at the point and inscribed with its mystical Arabic sentence, While underneath, in a corner, were fowling-piece, musket, and matchlock. | Buy | ||
| The Song of Hiawatha | Should you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest With the dew and damp of meadows, With the curling smoke of wigwams, With the rushing of great rivers, With their frequent repetitions, And their wild reverberations As of thunder in the mountains? | Buy | ||
| Anita Loos | ||||
| Gentlemen Prefer Blondes | March 16th: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. | Buy | ||
| Federico Garcia Lorca | ||||
| The House of Bernard Alba | FIRST SERVANT (entering): The tolling of those bells hits me right between the eyes. | Buy | ||
| Konrad Zacharias Lorenz | ||||
| King Solomon's Ring | Why should I tell of the darker side of life with animals? Because the degree of one's willingness to bear with this darker side is the measure of one's love for animals. I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents who only shook their heads or sighed when, as a schoolboy or young student, I once again brought home a new and probably yet more destructive pet? And what has my wife put up with, in the course of the years? | Buy | ||
| George Horace Lorimer | ||||
| Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son | CHICAGO, October 1, 189-- Dear Pierrepont: Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be sure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for is to get a little education that's so good and plenty there. When it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost. | Buy | ||
| Bret Lott | ||||
| The Hunt Club | My name is Huger Dillard. You say it YOU-gee, not like it's spelled. It's French, I heard. | Buy | ||
| Howard Phillips Lovecraft | ||||
| At the Mountains of Madness | I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic--with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap--and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. | Buy | ||
| Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family | Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species--if separate species we be--for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. | Buy | ||
| 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. | Buy | ||
| Samuel Lover | ||||
| Handy Andy | Andy Rooney was a fellow who had the most singularly ingenious knack of doing everything the wrong way; disappointment waited on all affairs in which he bore a part, and destruction was at his fingers' ends; so the nickname the neighbours stuck upon him was Handy Andy, and the jeering jingle pleased them. | Buy | ||
| Rory O'More | In a retired district of the South of Ireland, near some wild hills and a romantic river, a small by-road led to a quiet spot, where, at the end of a little land, or boreen, which was sheltered by some hazel-hedges, stood a cottage which in England would have been considered a poor habitation, but in Ireland was absolutely comfortable, when contrasted with the wretched hovels that most of her peasantry are doomed to dwell in. | Buy | ||
| Janette Sebring Lowrey | ||||
| The Poky Little Puppy | Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence and went for a walk in the wide, wide world. | Buy | ||
| Lois Lowry | ||||
| The Giver | It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. | Buy | ||
| Malcolm Lowry | ||||
| Under the Volcano | Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus. | Buy | ||
| Robert Ludlum | ||||
| The Aquitaine Progression | Geneva. City of sunlight and bright reflections. Of billowing white sails on the lake--sturdy, irregular buildings above, their rippling images on the water below. Of myriad flowers surrounding blue-green pools of fountains--duets of exploding colors. Of small quaint bridges arching over the glassy surfaces of man-made ponds to tiny man-made islands, sanctuaries for lovers and friends and quiet negotiators. Reflections. | Buy | ||
| The Bourne Identity | The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying. | Buy | ||
| The Bourne Supremacy | Kowloon. The teeming final extension of China that is no part of the north except in spirit--but the spirit runs deep and descends into the caverns of men's souls without regard for the harsh, irrelevant practicalities of political borders. The land and the water are one, and it is the will of the spirit that determines how man will use the land and the water--again without regard for such abstractions as useless freedom or escapable confinement. The concern is only with empty stomachs. Survival. There is nothing else. All the rest is dung to be spread over the infertile fields. | Buy | ||
| The Bourne Ultimatum | The cacophony spun out of control as the crowds swelled through the amusement park in the countryside on the outskirts of Baltimore. The summer night was hot, and nearly everywhere faces and necks were drenched with sweat, except for those screaming as they plunged over the crests of a roller coaster, or shrieking as they plummeted down the narrow, twisting gullies of racing water in torpedo sleds. The garishly colored, manically blinking lights along the midway were joined by the grating sounds of emphatic music metallically erupting out of an excess of loudspeakers--calliopes presto, marches prestissimo. | Buy | ||
| The Holcroft Covenant | JANUARY 197-- "Attention! Le train de sept heures a destination de Zurich partira du quai numero douze." The tall American in the dark-blue raincoat glanced up at the cavernous dome of the Geneva railway station, trying to locate the hidden speakers. The expression on his sharp, angular face was quizzical; the announcement was in French, a language he spoke but little and understood less. Nevertheless, he was able to distinguish the word Zurich; it was his signal. | Buy | ||
| The Icarus Agenda | The angry waters of the Oman Gulf were a prelude to the storm racing down through the Strait of Hormuz into the Arabian Sea. It was sundown, marked by the strident prayers nasally intoned by bearded muezzins in the minarets of the port city's mosques. The sky was darkening under the black thunderheads that swirled ominously across the lesser darkness of evening like roving behemoths. Blankets of heat lightning sporadically fired the eastern horizon over the Makran Mountains of Turbat, two hundred miles across the sea in Pakistan. | Buy | ||
| The Matarese Circle | The band of carolers huddled at the corner, stamping their feet and swinging their arms, their young voice penetrating the cold night air between the harsh sounds of automobile horns and police whistles and the metallic strains of Christmas music blaring out from storefront speakers. The snowfall was dense, snarling traffic, causing the hordes of last-minute shoppers to shield their eyes. | Buy | ||
| The Matlock Paper | Loring walked out the side entrance of the Justice Department and looked for a taxi. It was nearly first thirty, a spring Friday, and the congestion in the Washington streets was awful. Loring stood by the curb and held up his left hand, hoping for the best. He was about to abandon the effort when a cab that had picked up a fare thirty feet down the block stopped in front of him. | Buy | ||
| The Parsifal Mosaic | The cold rays of the moon streaked down from the night sky and bounced off the rolling surf, which burst into suspended sprays of white where isolated waves crashed into the rocks of the shoreline. The stretch of beach between the towering boulders of the Costa Brava was the execution ground. It had to be. May God damn this goddamned world--it had to be! | Buy | ||
| The Scorpio Illusion | Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles. During the past three days, before the dead calm descended, this section of the Caribbean had suffered not only a hurricane with the force of the infamous Hugo, but sixteen hours later a tropical storm whose bolts of lightning and earthshaking thunder had set fire to a thousand palms and caused a hundred thousand residents of the island chain to look to their gods for deliverance. | Buy | ||
| Janet Lunn | ||||
| The Hollow Tree | Throughout all her long life, Phoebe Olcott never forgot a single moment of the last happy afternoon she spent at home by the Connecticut River. | Buy | ||
| Gavin Lyall | ||||
| Midnight Plus One | It was April in Paris, so the rain wasn't as cold as it had been a month before. | Buy | ||