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| An Eye of the Fleet | Richard Woodman | A baleful sun broke through the overcast to shed a patch of pale light on the frigate. | Buy | |
| A Much Younger Man | Dianne Highbridge | A boy on the train, that's all. | Buy | |
| A House of Gentlefolk | Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue. | Buy | |
| The Little French Girl | Anne Douglas Sedgwick | A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager at Montarel. | Buy | |
| The Long Road Home | Danielle Steel | A clock ticked loudly in the hall as Gabriella Harrison stood silently in the utter darkness of the closet. It was filled with winter coats, and they scratched her face, as she pressed her thin six-year-old frame as far back as she could, deep among them. | Buy | |
| Message in a Bottle | Nicholas Sparks | A cold December wind was blowing, and Theresa Osborne crossed her arms as she stared out over the water. Earlier, when she'd arrived, there had been a few people walking along the shore, but they'd taken note of the clouds and were long since gone. Now she found herself alone on the beach, and she took in her surroundings. | Buy | |
| Jubal Sackett | Louis L'Amour | 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 | |
| Ring-a-Ding-Ding | Frank Kane | A cold, driving rain slanted down from the black sky, looked like buckshot hitting the puddles along the curb. | Buy | |
| The Yearling | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings | A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. | Buy | |
| The Last Temptation of Christ | Nikos Kazantzakis | A cool heavenly breeze took possession of him. | Buy | |
| The Newcomes | William Makepeace Thackeray | A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him. | Buy | |
| The Wanderer | Mika Waltari | A decision once taken brings peace to a man's mind and eases his soul. With my brother Andy and my dog Rael I had turned my back upon Rome and all Christendom and had started on my way to the Holy Land to atone for my sins. | Buy | |
| Suspense | Joseph Conrad | A deep red glow flushed the fronts of marble palaces piled up on the slope of an arid mountain whose barren ridge traced high on the darkening sky a ghostly and glimmering outline. | Buy | |
| The Gun | C S Forester | A defeated army was falling back through the mountains from Espinosa. | Buy | |
| Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe (Thomas Clayton Wolfe) | A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. | Buy | |
| Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 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. | Buy | |
| Of Mice and Men | John Ernst Steinbeck | A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. | Buy | |
| Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck | A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green. | Buy | |
| Breath, Eyes, Memory | Edwidge Danticat | A flattened and drying daffodil was dangling off the little card that I had made my aunt Atie for Mother's day. I pressed my palm over the flower and squashed it against the plain beige cardboard. When I turned the corner near the house, I saw her sitting in an old rocker in the yard, staring at a group of children crushing dried yellow leaves into the ground. | Buy | |
| Rough Translations [1985], Old Souls | Molly Giles | A fortune-teller told my sister Ellen she would never live to be twenty-nine. | Buy | |
| The Faerie Queene | Edmund Spenser | A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. | Buy | |
| Sanditon | Jane Austen | A gentleman and a lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex coast which lies between Hastings and Eastbourne, being induced by business to quit the high road and attempt a very rough land, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent, half rock, half sand. | Buy | |
| The Anti-Death League | Kingsley Amis | A girl and an older woman were walking along a metalled pathway. | Buy | |
| Lives of the Hunted | Ernest Thompson Seton | A great broad web of satin, shining white, and, strewn across, long clumps and trailing wreaths of lilac, almost white, wistaria bloom,--pendent, shining and so delicately wrought in palest silk that still the web was white; and in and out and trailed across, now lost, now plain, two slender, twining, intertwining chains of golden thread. | Buy | |
| The Witch of Prague | Francis Marion Crawford | A great multitude of people filled the church, crowded together in the old black pews, standing closely thronged in the nave and aisles, pressing shoulder to shoulder even in the two chapels on right and left of the apse, a vast gathering of pale men and women whose eyes were sad and in whose faces was written the history of their nation. | Buy | |
| The Lamp in the Desert | Ethel May Dell | A great roar of British voices pierced the jewelled curtain of the Indian night. A toast with musical honours was being drunk in the sweltering dining-room of the officers' mess. The enthusiastic hubbub spread far, for every door and window was flung side. Though the season was yet in its infancy, the heat was intense. | Buy | |
| The Awakening | Kate Chopin | 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!" | Buy | |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sand into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. | Buy | |
| The Silent Passage | Gail Sheehy | A group of recognizably high-powered media women on the shady
side of forty were spaced around the table between their husbands
and lovers at a Washington dinner party when a single sentence
shattered their well-groomed calm. It came out of the mouth of
the stunning network newswoman who ordinarily speaks in
ninety-second bursts of inside-the-Beltway shorthand. "Okay, there are only two subjects worth talking about--menopause and face-lifts." It was as though a nine-hundred-pound gorilla had just jumped up on the table. | Buy | |
| Burglars Can't Be Choosers | Lawrence Block | A handful of minutes after nine I hoisted my Bloomingdale's shopping bag and moved out of a doorway and into step with a tall blond fellow with a faintly equine cast to his face. | Buy | |
| Saggy Baggy Elephant | Kathryn Jackson and Byron Jackson | A happy little elephant was dancing through the jungle. He thought he was dancing beautifully, one-two-three-kick. But whenever he went one-two-three, his big feet pounded so that they shook the whole jungle. | Buy | |
| Hornblower Goes to Sea | C S Forester | A January gale was roaring up the Channel, blustering loudly, and bearing in its bosom rain squalls whose big drops rattled loudly on the tarpaulin clothing of those among the officers and men whose duties kept them on deck. | Buy | |
| War and Remembrance | Herman Wouk | A liberty boat full of sleepy hung-over sailors came clanging along-side the U.S.S. Northampton, and a stocky caprain in dress whites jumped out to the accommodation ladder. The heavy cruiser, it gray hull and long guns dusted pink by the rising sun, swung to a buoy in Pearl Harbor on the incoming tide. | Buy | |
| The Confusions of Young Toerless | Robert Edler von Musil | A little station on the stretch leading towards Russia. Infinitely straight, four parallel iron tracks ran in both directions, between the yellow gravel of the wide track. Alongside each, like a dirty shadow, was the dark line burned into the ground by the exhaust. | Buy | |
| The Runagates Club | John Buchan | A London dining-club is a curious organism, for it combines great tenacity of life with a chameleon-like tendency to change its colour. | Buy | |
| Barabbas | Marie Corelli | A long sultry Syrian day was drawing near its close. The heavy heat was almost insupportable, and a poisonous stench oozed up from the damp earth-floors of the Jewish prison, charging what little air there was with a deadly sense of suffocation. | Buy | |
| Doctor Grimshawe's Secret | Nathaniel Hawthorne | A long time ago, in a town with which I used to be familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect, known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe, whose household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an old maid of all work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and wonderfully sluttish in attire. | Buy | |
| Sweet Dreams | Michael Frayn | A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green. | Buy | |
| An Occurence At Owl Creek Bridge | Ambrose Bierce | A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. | Buy | Read |
| The Andromeda Strain | Michael Crichton | A man with binoculars. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night. | Buy | |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep | Phillip Dick | A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. | Buy | |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep | Philip K. Dick | A merry surge of electricity piped by automated alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised--it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice--he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again. | Buy | |
| The Debacle | Emile Zola | A mile from Mulhouse, near the Rhine, in the middle of the fertile plain, the camp had been set up. In the fading light of this August evening, beneath a troubled sky laden with heavy clouds, the tents were pitched in rows, and the stacks of arms could be seen glinting at regular intervals along the edge of the camp, with sentinels standing guard over them, rifles at the ready, motionless, eyes somewhere on the far horizon, lost in the purplish mists drifting up from the great river. | Buy | |
| Executive Suite | Cameron Hawley | A minute or two before or after two-thirty on the afternoon on the twenty-second of June, Avery Bullard suffered what was subsequently diagnosed as a cerebral hemorrhage. | Buy | |
| Are You My Mother? | P D Eastman | A mother bird sat on her egg. | Buy | |
| Won by the Sword | G A Henty | A mounted officer, followed by two orderlies, was proceeding at a brisk trot from Paris to St. Denis, in October, 1639, when he came upon a large party of boys, who, armed with sticks, were advancing in something like military order against a wall on the top of a low hill. | Buy | |
| The Cricket in Times Square | George Selden | 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. | Buy | |
| Max | Katherine Cecil Thurston (nee Madden) | A night journey is essentially a thing of possibilities. | Buy | |
| The Optimist's Daughter | Eudora Welty | 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. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Company | Bernard Cornwell | A pale horse seen a mile away at sunrise means the night is over. | Buy | |
| Sacred | Denis Lehane | A piece of advice: If you ever follow someone in my neighborhood, don't wear pink. | Buy | |
| D'ri and I | Irving Bacheller | A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers. | Buy | |
| The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy | A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor. The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. | Buy | |
| The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy | A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twighlight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. | Buy | |
| Gravity's Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | A screaming comes across the sky. | Buy | |
| The Mysterious Rider | Zane Grey | A September sun, losing some of its heat if not its brilliance, was dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and billowy, rolled down from the higher country. They were smooth, sweeping, with long velvety slopes and isolated patches of aspens that blazed in autumn gold. Splotches of red vine colored the soft gray of sage. Old White Slides, a mountain scarred by avalanche, towered with bleak rocky peak above the valley, sheltering it form the north. | Buy | |
| The Pilot | James Fenimore Cooper | A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent. | Buy | |
| Southern Mail | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out. And then night fell. | Buy | |
| Flashforward | Robert J Sawyer | A slice through spacetime... | Buy | |
| A Deadly Shade of Gold | John D MacDonald | A smear of fresh blood has a metallic smell. | Buy | |
| Brave New World | Alduous Huxley | 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. | Buy | |
| Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | A squat grey 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. | Buy | |
| The End of the Affair | Graham Henry Greene | A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. | Buy | |
| Bonjour Tristesse | Francoise Sagan (pseudonym of Francoise Quoirez) | A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else. | Buy | |
| Bonjour Tristesse | Françoise Sagan | A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. To-day something envelopes me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.. | Buy | |
| Double Exposure | Stephen Collins | A striking redhead in a short black skirt and sparkly yellow see-through blouse sat alone at a dark booth in a tiny, almost-empty bar on the corner of Third Avenue and Eight-ninth Street, her eyes glued to a TV set suspended over rows of bottles. | Buy | |
| The Scarlet Pimpernel | Baroness Emmuska Orczy | A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity. | Buy | |
| The Miracle of the Bells | Russell Janney | A tall figure of a man stepped down from the last day coach at the end of the express train from the West. | Buy | |
| Nedra | George Barr McCutcheon | A tall young man sped swiftly up the wide stone steps leading to the doorway of a mansion in one of Chicago's most fashionable avenues. | Buy | |
| Endymion | John Keats (1) | A thing of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. | Buy | |
| Silent Prey | John Sandford | A thought sparked in the chaos of Bekker's mind. | Buy | |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | 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. | Buy | |
| Maggie | Stephen Crane | A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honour of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him. His infantile countenance was livid with the fury of battle. His small body was writhing in the delivery of oaths. | Buy | |
| The Mill on the Floss | George Eliot | 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. | Buy | |
| The Mill on the Floss | George Eliot | 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. | Buy | |
| Desiree | Annemarie Selinko | A woman can usually get what she wants from a man if she has a well-developed figure. So I've decided to stuff four handkerchiefs into the front of my dress tomorrow; then I shall look really grown up. Actually I am grown up already, but nobody else knows that, and I don't altogether look it. | Buy | |
| The Hair of Harold Roux | Thomas Alonzo Williams | Aaron Benham sits at his desk hearing the wrong voices. | Buy | |
| Alaska | James A. Michener | About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America. | Buy | |
| The Castle Inn | Stanley J Weyman | About a hundred and thirty years ago, when the third George, whom our grandfathers knoew in his blind dotage, was a young and sturdy bridegroom; when old Q., whom 1810 found peering from his balcony in Piccadilly, deaf, toothless, and a skeleton, was that gay and lively spark, the Earl of March; when bore and boreish were words of haut ton, unknown to the vulgar, and the price of a borough was 5,000 l., when gibbets still served for sign-posts, and railways were not and highwaymen were - to be more exact, in the early spring of the year 1767, a travelling chariot-and-four drew up about five in the evening before the inn at Wheatley Bridge, a short stage from Oxford on the Oxford road. | Buy | |
| The Foxes of Harrow | Frank Yerby | About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden. | Buy | |
| Of Time and the River | Thomas Wolfe (Thomas Clayton Wolfe) | About fifteen years ago, at the end of the second decade of this century, four people were standing together on the platform of the railway station of a town in the hills of western Catawba. | Buy | |
| 10,000 a Year | Samuel Warren | About ten o'clock one Sunday morning, the dazzling sunbeams irradiating a dismal back attic in one of the courts adjoining Oxford Street, London, at length awoke a young man lying in bed. | Buy | |
| Peg Woffington | Charles Reade | About the middle of the last century, at eight o'clock in the evening, in a large but poor apartment, a man was slumbering on a rough couch. His rusty and worn suit of black was of a piece with his uncarpeted room, the deal table of home manufacture, and its slim unsnuffed candle. | Buy | |
| Mansfield Park | Jane Austen | About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. | Buy | |
| Homer Price | Robert McCloskey | About two miles outside of Centerburg where route 56 meets route 56A there lives a boy named Homer. | Buy | |
| Gentleman's Agreement | Laura Z. Hobson | Abrupt as anger, depression plunged through him. | Buy | |
| The Talk Talked Between Worms | Lee K Abbott | According to the tapes, my father, then about as run-of-the-mill as Joe Blow himself, didn't want to see the thing. | Buy | |
| The Iliad | Homer | Achilles' cursed anger sing, O goddess, that son of Peleus, which stated a myriad sufferings for the Achaeans. | Buy | |
| The Iliad | Homer | Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing! | Buy | |
| The Wanderer of the Wasteland | Zane Grey | Adam Larey gazed with hard and wondering eyes down the silent current of the red river upon which he meant to drift away into the desert. | Buy | |
| The Inshore Squadron | Alexander Kent | Admiral Sir George Beauchamp held his thin hands towards the blazing log fire and rubbed his palms slowly together to restore his circulation. | Buy | |
| The Million Pound Cypher, or, MW-XX.3 | Roland Pertwee | Admiral Sir Jesmond Bridger defined the situation clearly enough. | Buy | |
| Prisoner's Hope | David Feintuch | Admiral Tremaine drew himself up, jowls pursed in indignation. | Buy | |
| Life and Gabriella | Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow | After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. | Buy | |
| The Quiet American | Graham Greene | 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. | Buy | |
| The Rover | Joseph Conrad | After entering at break of day the inner roadstead of the Port of Toulon, exchanging several loud hails with one of the guardboats of the Fleet, which directed him where he was to take up his berth, Master-Gunner Peyrol let go the anchor of the sea-worn and battered ship in his charge, between the arsenal and the town, in full view of the principal quay. The course of his life, which in the opinion of any ordinary person might have been regarded as full of marvellous incidents (only he himself had never marvelled at them), had rendered him undemonstrative to such a degree that he did not even let out a sign of relief at the rumble of the cable. | Buy | |
| White Banners | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | After so long a pause that Marcia felt sure whoever it was must have gone away, the front doorbell rang again, a courteously brief 'still waiting.' | Buy | |
| The Honourable Schoolboy | John Le Carre | 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 Honourable Schoolboy | John Le Carré | 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 Whisper of the Axe | Richard Condon | Agatha Teel's left shoulder had been shattered by a bullet fifty-one seconds ago. | Buy | |
| Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy | Charles Dickens | Ah! It's pleasant to drop into my own easy-chair my dear though a little palpitating what with trotting upstairs and what with trotting down, and why kitchen stairs should all be corner stairs is for the builder to justify though I do not think they fully understand their trade and never did, else why the sameness and why not more conveniences and fewer druaghts and likewise making a practice of laying the plaster on too thick I am well convinced which holds the damp, and as to chimney-pots putting them on by guesswork like hats at a party and no more knowing what their effect will be uponthe smoke bless you than I do if so much, except that it will mostly be either to send it down your throat in a straight form or to give it a twist before it goes there. | Buy | |
| The Amazing Web | Harry Stephen Keeler | Al Lipke, his sleek black hair parted in the middle, his checked suit pressed to fit every curve of his well shaped form, his lone valise unpacked and its contents placed on the bureau, took from the bell boy of the Hotel McAlpin in New York City the Chicago newspaper he had just sent out for, and dismissing the boy with the usual gratuity went over to the tiny desk at the window which looked out on Broadway. | Buy | |
| Palace of Desire | Naguib Mahfouz | Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad closed the door behind him and crossed the courtyard of his house by the pale light of the stars. His step was lethargic, and his walking stick sank into the dusty earth whenever he leaned on it wearily. He felt on fire and craved cold water so he could wash his face, head, and neck and escape, if only briefly, from the July heat and from the inferno in his belly and head. | Buy | |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 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. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. | Buy | |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 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. | Buy | |
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | 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?" | Buy | |
| Heaven and Hell | John Jakes | All around him, pillars of fire shot skyward. The fighting had ignited the dry underbrush, then the trees. Smoke brought tears to his eyes and made it hard to see the enemy skirmishers. | Buy | |
| Void Moon | Michael Connelly | All around them the cacophony of greed carried on in its most glorious and extreme excess. | Buy | |
| The Promise | Chaim Potok | All around us everything was changing in the order of things we had fashioned for ourselves. | Buy | |
| In the Beginning | Chaim Potok | All beginnings are hard. | Buy | |
| The Moral Compass | William J Bennett | All children need bread and shelter. But a true home, of course, is much more than that. Children also need love and order and, because they are not born knowing the difference between right and wrong, a place where they can begin to develop a moral sense. The transmission of virtues is one important reason for a home, and attention to the virtues is one the important ties that bind a family together. | Buy | |
| Peter Pan | Sir James Matthew Barrie | All children, except one, grow up. | Buy | |
| The Loved One | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | All day the head had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts. | Buy | |
| Election | Tom Perrotta | All I ever wanted to do was teach. I never had to struggle like other people with the question of what to do with my life. | Buy | |
| The Star Rover [1914] (ch. 1), (also titled The Jacket | Jack London | 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 | |
| Gorky Park | Martin Cruz Smith | All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights
so dazzling. The van jacked, stalled and quit on a drift, and the homicide team got out, militia officers cut from a pattern of short arms and low brows, wrapped in sheepskin greatcoats. | Buy | |
| Hunger | Knut Hamson | All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania -- that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him.... | Buy | |
| Dead Folks' Blues | Steven Womack | All right, I'll tell you. | Buy | |
| The Neverending Story | Michael Ende | All the beasts in Howling Forest were safe in their caves, nests, and burrows. | Buy | |
| The Man Who Loved Children | Christina Stead | All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home. They were not usually allowed to run helter-skelter about the streets, but Sam was out late with the naturalists looking for lizards and salamanders round the Potomac bluffs. Henrietta, their mother, was in town, Bonnie, their youthful and general servant, had her afternoon off, and they were being minded by Louisa, their half sister, eleven and a half years old, the eldest of their brood. | Buy | |
| Lives of a Bengal Lancer | Francis Yeats-Brown | All the long way from Bareilly to Khushalgarh on the Indus (the first stage of my journey to Bannu) I was alone in my railway carriage with two couchant lions. | Buy | |
| Cimarron | Edna Ferber | All the Venables sat at Sunday dinner. | Buy | |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | All this happened, more or less. | Buy | |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. | Buy | |
| Westward Ho! | Charles Kingsley | All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge, where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west. | Buy | |
| The Uncommercial Traveller | Charles Dickens | Allow me to introduce myself - first negatively. | Buy | |
| The Understanding Heart | Peter B Kyne | Along the narrow, single-track dirt road that led through the canyons and over the low foot-hills on the western fringe of the San Dimas National Forest a young man rode on a handsome Morgan-bred horse. | Buy | |
| Crome Yellow | Aldous Huxley | Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. | Buy | |
| The Rubaiyat | Omar Khayyam ("The Tent-Maker") | Although I have a handsome face and colour. Cheek like the tulips, form like the cypress, It is not clear why the Eternal Painter Thus tricked me out for the dusty show-booth of earth. | Buy | |
| The Captain from Connecticut | C S Forester | Although it was mid-afternoon it was nearly as dark as a summer night. | Buy | |
| Richard Bolitho - Midshipman | Alexander Kent | Although only noon, the clouds which scudded busily above Portsmouth harbour made it seem closer to evening. | Buy | |
| The African Queen | C S Forester | Although she herself was ill enough to justify being in bed had she been a person weak-minded enough to give up, Rose Sayer could see that her brother, the Reverend Samuel Sayer, was far more ill. | Buy | |
| The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald | Clifford Hicks | Alvin awoke with a start the instant the string jerked his big toe. | Buy | |
| Alvin's Secret Code | Clifford Hicks | Alvin Fernald had a warm, tingly feeling smack in the middle of his stomach. | Buy | |
| In the Wilderness | Robert Smythe Hichens | Amedeo Dorini, the hall porter of the Hotel Cavour in Milan, stood on the pavement before the hotel one autumn afternoon in the year 1894, waiting for the omnibus, which had gone to the station, and which was now due to return, bearing--Amedeo hoped--a load of generously inclined travelers. During the years of his not unpleasant servitude Amedeo had become a student of human nature. He had learnt to judge shrewdly and soundly, to sum up quickly, to deliver verdicts which were not unjust. | Buy | |
| The Godfather | Mario Puzo | 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. | Buy | |
| Even Cowgirls Get the Blues | Tom Robbins | Amoebae leave no fossils. | Buy | |
| Even Cowgirls Get the Blues | Tom Robbins | Amoebae leave no fossils. They haven't any bones. (No teeth, n belt buckles, no wedding rings.) It is impossible, therefore, to determine how long amoebae have been on Earth. | Buy | |
| Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens | Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no ficticious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. | Buy | |
| Diana of the Crossways | George Meredith | Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her wit: "an unusual combination," in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her. | Buy | |
| Burger's Daughter | Nadine Gordimer | Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. | Buy | |
| This Side of Paradise | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. | Buy | |
| Command a King's Ship | Alexander Kent | An Admiralty messenger opened the door of a small anteroom and said politely, "If you would be so good as to wait, sir." | Buy | |
| The Mystery of Edwin Drood | Charles Dickens | An ancient English Cathederal Tower? | Buy | |
| Reflections in a Golden Eye | Carson McCullers | An army post in peacetime is a dull place. | Buy | |
| Tom Jones | Henry Fielding | An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. | Buy | |
| The French Lieutenant's Woman | John Fowles | 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. | Buy | |
| The Gambler | Katherine Cecil Thurston (nee Madden) | An eight-mile drive over rain-washed Irish roads in the quick-falling dusk of autumn is an experience trying to the patience, even to the temper, of the average Saxon. | Buy | |
| The Lone Gunhawk | Frank Gruber | An emigrant train, seeking the shortcut to the golden land on the Pacific Coast, had once toiled up the eastern slope of this mountain and looking down the almost vertical western side had abandoned all hope. | Buy | |
| Sandy | Alice Caldwell Rice | An English mist was rolling lazily inland from the sea. It half enveloped the two great ocean liners that lay tugging at their moorings in the bay, and settled over the wharf with a grim determination to check, as far as possible, the traffic of the morning. | Buy | |
| The Goose Girl | Harold MacGrath | An old man, clothed in picturesque patches and tatters, paused and leaned on his stout oak staff. He was tired. He drew off his rusty felt hat, swept a sleeve across his forehead, and sighed. He had walked many miles that day, and even now the journey's end, near as it really was, seemed far away. | Buy | |
| The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graubunden. It was the height of summer, and he planned to stay for three weeks. | Buy | |
| Two from Galilee | Marjorie Holmes | And now she was a woman. She was a woman like other women and her step was light as she hurried through the bright new morning toward the well. She knew she need not tell the others, they would know the minute they saw her. | Buy | |
| Everybody Dies | Lawrence Block | Andy Buckley said, "Jesus Christ," and braked the Cadillac to a stop. | Buy | |
| Handy Andy | Samuel Lover | 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 | |
| The Gift | Danielle Steel | Annie Whittaker loved everything about Christmas. She loved the weather, and the trees, brightly lit on everyone's front lawn, and the Santas outlined in lights on the roofs of people's houses. She loved the carols, and waiting for Santa Claus to come, going skating and drinking hot chocolate afterwards, and stringing popcorn with her mother and sitting wide-eyed afterwards looking at how beautiful their Christmas tree was, all lit up. Her mother just let het sit there in the glow of it, her five-year-old face filled with wonder. | Buy | |
| Bright Orange for the Shroud | John D MacDonald | Another season was ending. | Buy | |
| A Sportsman's Notebook | Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | Anyone who has crossed from the district of Bolkhov into that of Zhizdra will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the provinces of Orel and Kaluga. | Buy | |
| The Siege of Krishnapur | J G Farrell | Anyone who has never before visited Krishnapur, and who approaches from the east, is likely to think he has reached the end of his journey a few miles sooner than he expected. | Buy | |
| Me Talk Pretty One Day | David Sedaris | Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me." | Buy | |
| Mostly Harmless | Douglas Adams | Anything that happens, happens. | Buy | |
| The Double Image | Helen MacInnes | April in Paris, and a sprinkle of rain, a sudden whip of cool breeze, a graying sky to end the bright promise of the evening. John Craig decided that his saunter along the Boulevard Saint-Germain might come to a quick end any moment now, and began looking for a place of retreat. | Buy | |
| The Two Towers | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | Aragorn sped on up the hill. Every now and again he bent to the ground. Hobbits go light, and their footprints are not easy even for a Ranger to read, but not far from the top a spring crossed the path, and in the wet earth he saw what he was seeking. | Buy | |
| Convention | Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II | Archie DuPage opened the door, but a blast of trumpets rang down
the corridor and drove him back inside the hotel room. California, here we come! | Buy | |
| Are You There God, It's Me Margaret | Judy Blume | Are you there God? It's me, Margaret. We're moving today. I'm so scared God. I've never lived anywhere but here. Suppose I hate my new school? Suppose everybody there hates me? Please help me God. Don't let New Jersey be too horrible. Thank you. | Buy | |
| Death Claims | Joseph Hansen | Arena Blanca was right. | Buy | |
| The Aeneid | Virgil | Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore. [Lat., Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit Litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto Vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.] | Buy | |
| The Sum of All Fears | Tom Clancy | Arnold van Damm sprawled back in his executive swivel chair with all the elegance of a rag doll tossed into a corner. Jack had never seen him wear a coat except in the presence of the presence of the President, and not always then. At formal affairs that required black tie, Ryan wondered if Arnie needed a Secret Service agent standing by with a gun. | Buy | |
| The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza | Lawrence Block | Around five-thirty I put down the book I'd been reading and started shooing customers out of the store. | Buy | |
| The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West | Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window. | Buy | |
| How The West Was Lost | Stephen Aron | Around sunset on December 22, 1769, while hunting near the Kentucky River, Daniel Boone met Wil Emery. | Buy | |
| Ourselves to Know | John O'Hara | As a boy and until I was sixteen I spent a large part of every summer at my grandfather's house in Lyons, Pennsylvania. | Buy | |
| Stones From The River | Ursula Hegi | As a child Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside of others | Buy | |
| The Ambassador | Morris L. West | As a diplomat I have a good record. In his valedictory letter the President called it "a distinguished and meritorious career, the sum of whose service represents a great profit to the United States of America." | Buy | |
| The Street Called Straight | Basil King | As a matter of fact, Davenant was under no illusions concerning the quality of the welcome his hostess was according him, though he found a certain pleasure in being once more in her company. | Buy | |
| King Henry the Sixth, Part II | William Shakespeare | As by your high imperial majesty I had in charge at my depart for France, As procurator to your excellence, To marry Princess Margaret for your grace, So, in the famous ancient city Tours, In presence of the Kings of France and Sicil, The Dukes of Orleans, Calabar, Bretagne, and Alencon, Seven earls, twelve barons, and twenty reverend bishops, I have performed my mask and was espoused; . . . . | Buy | |
| The Lady Regrets | James M Fox | As far as I'm concerned, it never pays to speculate about the laws and principles of fate, if any. | Buy | |
| Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka | As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. | Buy | |
| Trunk Music | Michael Connelly | As he drove along Mulholland Drive toward the Cahuenga Pass, Bosch began to hear the music. | Buy | |
| The Space Merchants | Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth | As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. | Buy | |
| So Disdained | Nevil Shute (Nevil Shute Norway) | As I have said, this matter started in the night. | Buy | |
| Perelandra | C S Lewis | 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 | |
| As You Like It | William Shakespeare | As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion, - ... | Buy | |
| The Broad Highway | Jeffrey Farnol | As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me much. | Buy | |
| The First Men in the Moon | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. | Buy | |
| The Topless Tulip Caper | Lawrence Block | As I started through the door a man stepped in front of me and stood there like the front four of the Miami Dolphins. | Buy | |
| The Seven-Per-Cent Solution | John H. Watson, M.D., and Nicholas Meyer, editor | As I stated in the preamble to "The Final Problem," my marriage and my subsequent start in private practise wrought a subtle but definite alteration in the pattern of my friendship with Sherlock Holmes. At first his visits to my new home were regular and it was not infrequent that I repaid these calls with brief sojourns at my old Baker Street digs, where we sat before the fire, smoked a pipe or two, and Holmes caught me up on his latest investigations. | Buy | |
| The Pilgrim's Progress | John Bunyan | 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. | Buy | |
| England Your England | George Orwell | As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. | Buy | |
| Rare Birds | Edward Riche | As if being unbandaged, coming through gauze, Dave Purcell emerged from a deep trance. | Buy | |
| For Murder I Charge More | Frank McAuliffe | As long as those dunderheads at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., fail to maintain a proper file there will be a continuing need for journals of this nature. | Buy | |
| Within This Present | Margaret Ayer Barnes | As Mr. Horace Sewall cleared his bearded throat, pushed back his carved armchair, placed his damask napkin on the row of forks beside his Royal Crown Derby plate, picked up his champagne glass and rose to his feet, the eyes of Sally, his sixteen-year-old daughter, met those of her grandmother across the candlelit table with a little gleam of half-humorous, half-deprecatory sympathy. | Buy | |
| The Outcasts of Poker Flat | Bret Harte | As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous. | Buy | |
| Martin Chuzzlewit | Charles Dickens | As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breading, can possible sympathise with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first assured of the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it is undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely conncted with the agricultural interest. | Buy | |
| Storm Warning | Jack Higgins | As Prager turned the corner, thunder rumbled far out to sea and lightning flashed across the sky, giving for one brief moment a clear view of the harbor. The usual assortment of small craft and three or four coastal steamers were moored at the main jetty. The Deutschland was anchored in midstream, distinctive if only for the fact that she was the one sailing ship in the harbor. | Buy | |
| Ramage and the Freebooters | Dudley Pope | As Ramage's carriage rattled along Whitehall he was surprised to see the long and wide street was almost deserted. | Buy | |
| The Perennial Bachelor | Anne Parrish | As she lay floating in the grey river that flows between sleeping and waking, Maggie Campion knew, without remembering why, that it was a happy day. | Buy | |
| The Wheel of Life | Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow | As the night fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went to bed. | Buy | |
| Steamboat Gothic | Frances Parkinson Keyes | As usual, dinner at Cindy Lou had been a rich repast, and conducive to pleasant somnolence. | Buy | |
| Sartoris | William Faulkner | As usual, old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him, had walked three miles in from the county Poor Farm, fetching, like an odor, like the clean dusty smell of his faded overalls, the spirit of the dead man into that room where the dead man's son sat and where the two of them, pauper and banker, would sit for a half an hour in the company of him who had passed beyond death and then returned. | Buy | |
| Cadillacs | Joe Gores | At 5:04 P.M. on a Tuesday, October 17, Daniel Kearny Associates' narrow high-shouldered old charcoal Victorian at 760 Golden Gate Avenue ... fell over. | Buy | |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 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. | Buy | |
| The Silent Places | Stewart Edward White | At about eight o'clock one evening of the early summer a group of men were seated on a grass plot overlooking a broad river. The sun was just setting through the forest fringe directly behind them. | Buy | |
| The King Of The Mountains | Edmond About | At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles. | Buy | |
| The Pit | Frank Norris | At eight o'clock in the inner vestibule of the Auditorium Theatre by the window of the box office, Laura Dearborn, her younger sister Page, and their aunt--Aunt Wess'--were still waiting for the rest of the theatre-party to appear. | Buy | |
| The Outsider | Colin Wilson | At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem. He is the hole-in-corner man. | Buy | |
| Year of the Jackpot | Robert A. Heinlein | At first, Potiphar Breen did not notice the girl taking her clothes off. | Buy | |
| A Man's Woman | Frank Norris | At four o'clock in the morning everybody in the tent was still asleep, exhausted by the terrible march of the previous day. | Buy | |
| Airport | Arthur Hailey | At half-past six on a Friday evening in January, Lincoln International Airport, Illinois, was functioning, though with difficulty. | Buy | |
| The Secret Life of Bees | Sue Monk Kidd | At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam. | Buy | |
| The Love Machine | Jacqueline Susann | At nine in the morning, she was standing on the steps in front of the Plaza Hotel, shivering in a linen dress. One of the clothespins that held the back of the dress together clattered to the ground. A dresser hurried to replace it, and the photographer used the time to reload his camera. The hairdresser quickly retouched a few stray hairs with a can of hair spray and the session resumed. | Buy | |
| The Valley of Decision | Marcia Davenport | At nine o'clock on the morning of September nineteenth, in the year 1873, a young girl walked slowly up Western Avenue in Allegheny City, across the river from Pittsburgh. | Buy | |
| Virgin Soil | Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | At one o'clock on a spring day of 1868, in Petersburg, a man of twenty-seven, carelessly and shabbily dressed, was mounting the back stairs of a five-storied house in Officers' Street. Tramping heavily with his over-shoes trodden down at heel, and slowly rolling his bulky, ungainly person as he moved, this man at last reached the very top of the stairs. He stopped before a half-open door, hanging off its hinges, and without ringing the bell, merely giving a noisy sigh, he swung into a small, dark ante-room. | Buy | |
| Going into Society | Charles Dickens | At one of its reverses, the House fell into the occupation of a Showman. | Buy | |
| Bee Season | Myla Goldberg | At precisely 11 a.m. every teacher in every classroom at McKinley Elementary School tells their students to stand. The enthusiasm of the collective chair scrape that follows rates somewhere between mandatory school assembly and head lice inspection. | Buy | |
| The Poseidon Adventure | Paul Gallico | 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. | Buy | |
| Three Terrible Trins | Dick King-Smith | At six o'clock on the morning of her birthday, Mrs. Gray's husband was killed and eaten. It was her first birthday, and he was her third husband. | Buy | |
| A Thousand Acres | Jane Smiley | 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. | Buy | |
| The Confidence-Man | Herman Melville | At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the waterside in the city of St. Louis. | Buy | |
| The Man of the Forest | Zane Grey | At sunset hour the forest was still, lonely, sweet with tang of fir and spruce, blazing in gold and red and green; and the man who glided on under the great trees seemed to blend with the colors and, disappearing, to have become a part of the wild woodland. | Buy | |
| The #7 File | William P McGivern | At ten-thirty in the morning a big man in a black leather jacket turned off Second Avenue into Thirty-first Street. | Buy | |
| The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | At that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op apartment that so obsessed the Mayor . . . twelve-foot ceilings . . . two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who own the place and one for the help . . . Sherman McCoy was kneeling in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund. | Buy | |
| Wild Swans | Jung Chang | At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. | Buy | |
| Sonia: Between Two Worlds | Stephen McKenna | At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic. When I made his acquaintance some thirty years later he had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. | Buy | |
| The City in the Sahara | Jules Verne | At the beginning of the century even the most accurate and recent of maps represented the Sahara, that immense stretch of nearly 300,000 square miles, only by a blank space. | Buy | |
| To the Last Man | Zane Grey | At the end of a dry, uphill ride over barren country Jean Isbel unpacked to camp at the edge of the cedars where a little rocky canon, green with willow and cottonwood, promised water and grass. | Buy | |
| Thérèse Raquin | Emile Zola | At the end of the rue Guénégaud, as you come up from the river, you find the Passage du Pont-Neuf, a sort of narrow, dark corridor connecting rue Mazarine and rue de Seine. This passage is thirty yards long and two in width at the most; it is paved with yellowish flagstones, worn and loose, which always exude a damp pungent smell, and it covered with a flat, glazed roofing black with grime.. | Buy | |
| Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman's eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward. | Buy | |
| Daisy Miller | Henry James | At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel | Buy | |
| The Helmet of Navarre | Bertha Runkle (Bertha Runkle Bash) | At the stair-foot the landlord stopped me. "Here, lad, take a candle. The stairs are dark, and, since I like your looks, I would not have you break your neck." | Buy | |
| The Constant Nymph | Margaret Kennedy | At the time of his death the name of Albert Sanger was barely known to the musical public of Great Britain. Among the very few who had heard of him there were even some who called him Sanje, in the French manner, being disinclined to suppose that great men are occasionally born in Hammersmith. | Buy | |
| Wickford Point | John Phillips Marquand | At the top of Allen Southby's letter was engraved MARTIN HOUSE STUDY, and to the left in smaller type DR. SOUTHBY. | Buy | |
| Random Winds | Belva Plain | At the top of the long rise, Pa guided the horse toward the shade and drew in the reins. He pulled off his woolen jacket and laid it on the seat next to Martin. | Buy | |
| Chimera | John Barth | At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say, "You have a way with words, Scheherazade." | Buy | |
| The Simple Truth | David Baldacci | At this prison the doors are inches thick, steel; once factory smooth, they now carry multiple dents. Imprints of human faces, knees, elbows, teeth, residue of blood are harvested large on their gray surface. Prison hieroglyphics: pain, fear, death, all permanently recorded here, at least until a new slab of metal arrives. | Buy | |
| Ship of Fools | Katherine Anne Porter | 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. | Buy | |
| White Gold Wielder: The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book Three | Stephen R Donaldson | Awkward without its midmast, Starfare's Gem turned heavily toward the north, putting its stern to the water clogged with sand and foam which marked the passing of the One Tree. In the rigging, Giants labored and fumbled at their tasks, driven from line to line by the hoarse goad of Sevinhand's commands, even though Seadreamer lay dead on the deck below them. | Buy |