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| Books in database: 3191 | ||||||||
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| The Moonstone | Wilkie | I address these lines--written in India--to my relatives in England. My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle. | Buy | |
| The Menacers | Donald Hamilton | I always feel a little bad about smuggling a firearm through Mexican customs. | Buy | |
| Starship Troopers | Robert A. Heinlein | I always get the shakes before a drop. | Buy | |
| Goodbye to Berlin | Christopher Isherwood | I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. | Buy | |
| Doctor Marigold | Charles Dickens | I am a Cheap Jack, and my father's name was William Marigold | Buy | |
| Alton Locke | Charles Kingsley | I am a Cockney among Cockneys. | Buy | |
| A Patchwork Planet | Anne Tyler | I am a man you can trust, is how my customers view me. | Buy | |
| Notes From Underground | Fyodor Dostoevsky | I am a sick man ... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. | Buy | |
| Notes from the Underground | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I'm an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. | Buy | |
| Little Big Man | Thomas Berger | I am a white man and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten. | Buy | |
| The Little Savage | Captain Frederick Marryat | I am about to write a very curious history, as the reader will agree with me when he has read this book. We have more than one narrative of people being cast away upon desolate islands, and being left to their own resources, and no works are perhaps read with more interest; but I believe I am the first instance of a boy being left alone upon an uninhabited island. Such was, however, the case; and now I shall tell my own story. | Buy | |
| Breakfast at Tiffany's | Truman Capote | I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow | I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles. | Buy | |
| The Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | I am an invisible man. | Buy | |
| The Crystal Cave | Mary Stewart | I am an old man now, but then I was already past my prime when Arthur was crowned King. | Buy | |
| Creation | Gore Vidal | I am blind. But I am not deaf. Becuase of the incompleteness of my misfortune, I was obliged yesterday to listen for nearly six hours to a self-styled historian whose account of what the Athenians call "the Persian Wars" was nonsense of a sort that were I less old and more privileged, I would have risen in my seat at the Odeon and scandalized all Athens by answering him. | Buy | |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic | Buy | |
| A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. | Buy | |
| Eloise | Kay Thompson | I am Eloise I am six I am a city child I live at The Plaza | Buy | |
| At the Mountains of Madness | Howard Phillips Lovecraft | 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 | |
| How Green Was My Valley | Richard Llewellyn | 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 | |
| How to Be Good | Nick Hornby | I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him anymore. David isn't even in the car park with me. He's at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly's class teacher. The other bit just sort of . . . slips out. This is a mistake, obviously. | Buy | |
| Molloy | Samuel Beckett | I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I'd never have got there alone. There's this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. | Buy | |
| Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller | I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere nor a chair misplaced. We are alone here and we are dead. | Buy | |
| Regeneration | Pat Barker | I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. | Buy | |
| Myra Breckinridge | Gore Vidal | I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. | Buy | |
| Myra Breckinridge | Gore Vidal | I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. | Buy | |
| Every Living Thing | James Herriot | I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears. | Buy | |
| Finity | John Barnes | I am not an imaginative or adventurous person. | Buy | |
| The Family of Pascual Duarte | Camilo Jose Cela | I am not, sir, a bad person, though in truth I am not lacking in
reasons for being one. [Sp., Yo, senor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarian motivos para serlo.] | Buy | |
| Green Eggs and Ham | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | I am Sam I am Sam Sam I am That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am! | Buy | |
| Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received. | Buy | |
| The Wrecking Crew | Donald Hamilton | I awoke early, shaved, dressed, draped myself with cameras and equipment, and went on deck to record our entry into the port of Gothenburg. | Buy | |
| Too Many Crooks | Richard S Prather | I awoke in darkness, dull pain throbbing in my head, my side aching with each breath, and I lay quietly for a minute trying to remember where I was. | Buy | |
| The Silencers | Donald Hamilton | I beat the first real blizzard of the season across the mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. | Buy | |
| Emile | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | I began this disorderly and almost endless collection of scattered thoughts and observations in order to gratify a good mother who knows how to think. | Buy | |
| A Death in the Venetian Quarter | Alan Gordon | I blame the Pope. | Buy | |
| Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions | Edwin Abbott Abbott | I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. | Buy | Read |
| Room at the Top | John Gerard Braine | I came to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky grey of Guiseley sandstone. | Buy | |
| Naked Lunch | William S Burroughs | I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . . Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. | Buy | |
| The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay | Maurice Hewlett | I choose to record how Richard Count of Poictou rode all through one smouldering night to see Jehane Saint-Pol a last time. | Buy | |
| The Life of King Henry the Eighth | William Shakespeare | I come no more to make you laugh. Things now That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow We now present. | Buy | |
| Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life | Philip José Farmer | I could find out how the weather was on Friday, February 15, 1933, by checking an almanac. | Buy | |
| Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child | John Bradshaw | I couldn't believe I could be so childish. I was 40 years old and I had raged and screamed until everyone--my wife, my stepchildren, and my son--was terrified. Then I got in my car and left them. There I was, sitting all alone in a motel in the middle of our vacation on Padre Island. I felt very alone and ashamed. | Buy | |
| The Way Things Ought To Be | Rush H. Limbaugh, III | I decided to write this book to tell a bit about myself and my radio show and where I stand on the important political and social issues affecting our society today. | Buy | |
| The Cement Garden | Ian McEwan | I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. | Buy | |
| Possessing the Secret of Joy | Alice Walker | I did not realize for a long time that I was dead. | Buy | |
| A Stab in the Dark | Lawrence Block | I didn't see him coming. | Buy | |
| Rough Translations [1985], Pie Dance | Molly Giles | I don't know what to do about my husband's new wife. | Buy | |
| The Case of the Counterfeit Coin | George Wyatt | I don't think I'll ever forget that bottle of soda pop. | Buy | |
| Drinking: A Love Story | Caroline Knapp | I drank. I drank Fume Blank at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and I drank double shots of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks at a dingy Chinese restaurant across the street from my office, and I drank at home. For a long time I drank expensive red wine, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between a silky Merlot and a tart Cabernet Sauvignon and a soft, earthy Beaucastel from the south of France, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly they were beside the point. | Buy | |
| The Lovely Ambition | Mary Ellen Chase | I dreamed last night again about Mrs. Gowan. | Buy | |
| Double Indemnity | James M. Cain | I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywood. | Buy | |
| The Celestine Prophecy | James Redfield | I drove up to the restaurant and parked, then leaned back in my seat to think for a moment. Charlene, I knew, would already be inside, waiting to talk with me. But why? | Buy | |
| Two Girls, Fat and Thin | Mary Gaitskill | I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers. | Buy | |
| Mrs Piggy Wiggle | Betty MacDonald | I expect I might as well begin by telling you about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle so that whenever I mention her name, which I do very often in this book, you will not interrupt and ask, "Who is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle?" | Buy | |
| I Is for Innocent | Sue Grafton | I feel compelled to report that at the moment of my death, my entire life did not pass before my eyes in a flash. There was no beckoning white light at the end of a tunnel, no warm fuzzy feeling that my long-departed loved ones were waiting on The Other Side. What I experienced was a little voice piping up in an outraged tone, "Oh, come on. You're not serious. This is really it?" | Buy | |
| The Consul's Wife | W T Tyler | I first heard about African sorcery at a Catholic mission station on the Congo River below Bumba, a few hundred miles north of the equator. | Buy | |
| My Ántonia | Willa Sibert Cather | I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plains of North America. | Buy | |
| On The Road | Jack Kerouac | I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up | Buy | |
| Zorba the Greek | Nikos Kazantzakis | I first met him in Piraeus. | Buy | |
| My Mortal Enemy | Willa Sibert Cather | I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all. | Buy | |
| Looking Backward | Edward Bellamy | I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. | Buy | |
| The Captain | Jan de Hartog | I found both letters waiting for me among my mail when I came home from Valparaiso, Chile. | Buy | |
| Something Happened | Joseph Heller | I get the willies when I see closed doors. | Buy | |
| Something Happened | Joseph Heller | I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I
am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes
enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening
behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I
am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or
just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster
mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted
glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out
strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime. | Buy | |
| Assassins Have Starry Eyes | Donald Hamilton | I got up at five forty-five, started the stove, and went down to the creek for water. | Buy | |
| Semi-Tough | Dan Thomas B. Jenkins | I guess by now there can't be too many people anywhere who haven't heard about Billy Clyde Puckett, the humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football. | Buy | |
| Out of Africa | Isak Dinesen | I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold. | Buy | |
| The Cruise of the Midge | Michael Scott | I had been for six months fourth lieutenant of H.M.S. Gazelle, on board of which Sir Oliver Oakplank had his broad pennant* hoisted, as the commander-in-chief on the African station. The last time we touched at Cape Coast we took in with us a Spanish felucca, that we had previously cut out of the Bonny river, with part of her cargo of slaves on board. | Buy | |
| Mexico | James A. Michener | I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind. | Buy | |
| Gospel | Wilton Barnhardt | I had lost my faith, Josephus. | Buy | |
| Sunset Limited | James Lee Burke | I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earler outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny mails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall. | Buy | |
| The Aspern Papers | Henry James | I had taken Mrs Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips | Buy | |
| Ethan Frome | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as
generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different
story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office, you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was. | Buy | |
| Ethan Frome | Edith Wharton | I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. | Buy | |
| The Nine Unknown | Talbot Mundy | I had this story from a dozen people, or thirteen if you count Chullunder Ghose, whose accuracy is frequently perverted. | Buy | |
| Tarzan of the Apes | Edgar Rice Burroughs | I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. | Buy | |
| Line of Fire | Donald Hamilton | I had worked out the range from the window to the yellow fire hydrant down at the intersection three blocks away. | Buy | |
| Moonlight Becomes You | Mary Higgins Clark | I hate cocktail parties, Maggie thought wryly, wondering why she always felt like an alien when she attended one. Actually, I'm being too harsh, she thought. The truth is I hate cocktail parties when the only person I know is my supposed date, and he abandons me the minute we come in the door. | Buy | |
| The Bean Trees | Barbara Kingsolver | I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbines's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. | Buy | |
| A Christmas Tree | Charles Dickens | I have been looking on, this eveining, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. | Buy | |
| The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. | Buy | |
| The Holly-Tree | Charles Dickens | I have kept one secret in the course of my life. | Buy | |
| The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton | Jane Smiley | I have made up my mind to begin my account upon the first occasion when I truly knew where things stood with me, that is, that afternoon of the day my father, Arthur Harkness, was taken to the Quincy graveyard and buried between my mother, Cora Mary Harkness, and his first wife, Ella Harkness. | Buy | |
| The Razor's Edge | William Somerset Maugham | I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. | Buy | |
| Waiting for the Barbarians | J M Coetzee | I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. | Buy | |
| The Face of Battle | John Keegan | I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath. | Buy | |
| The Riddle of the Sands | Erskine Childers | I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude save for a few black faces - have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism | Buy | |
| The Embezzler | Louis Auchincloss | I have the distinctions of having become a legend in my lifetime, but not a very nice one. | Buy | |
| The Door | Mary Roberts Rinehart | I have wrenched knee, and for the past two weeks my days have consisted of three trays, two of them here in the library, a nurse at ten o'clock each morning with a device of infernal origin which is supposed to bake the pain out of my leg, and my thoughts for company. | Buy | |
| Night of Error | Desmond Bagley | I heard of the way my brother died on a wet and gloomy afternoon in London. | Buy | |
| The Riddle of the Travelling Skull | Harry Stephen Keeler | I knew full well, when the Chinaman stopped me in the street that night and coolly asked me for a light for his cigarette, that a light for his cigarette was the last thing in the world he really wanted! | Buy | |
| Melville Goodwin, USA | John Phillips Marquand | I knew nothing about what General Melville A. Goodwin had done in Berlin until I read of his feat in my own script shortly before going on the air one evening in October 1949. | Buy | |
| Two for the Dough | Janet Evanovich | I knew Ranger was beside me because I could see his earring gleaming in the moonlight. Everything else about him--his T-shirt, his flack vest, his slicked-back hair, and 9-mm Glock--was as black as the night. Even his skin tone seemed to darken in shade. Ricardo Carlos Manoso, the Cuban-American chameleon. | Buy | |
| Gap Creek | Robert R. Morgan | I know about Masenier because I was there. I seen him die. We didn't tell anybody the truth because it seemed so shameful, the way he died. It was too awful to describe to other people. But I was there, even though I didn't want to be, and I seen it all. | Buy | |
| The Last Precinct | Patricia Cornwell | I know from Lucy's voice that she is scared. Rarely is my brilliant, forceful, helicopter-piloting, fitness-obsessed, federal-law-enforcement-agent niece scared. | Buy | |
| Sermons and Soda-Water | John O'Hara | I know of no quiet quite like that of a men's club at about half past nine on a summer Sunday evening. | Buy | |
| Much Ado About Nothing | William Shakespeare | I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Arragon comes this night to Messina. | Buy | |
| How to Save Your Own Life | Erica Jong | I left my husband on Thanksgiving Day. It was nine years since I met him and almost that long since I'd married him--time enough to know something isn't working, and yet it wasn't easy. | Buy | |
| The Scapegoat | Daphne du Maurier | I left the car by the side of the cathedral, and then walked down the steps into the Place des Jacobins. | Buy | |
| The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay | Maurice Hewlett | I like this good man's account of leopards, and find it more pertinent to my matter than you might think. | Buy | |
| My Son, My Son! | Howard Spring (Robert Howard Spring) | I liked fetching the washing from the Moscrops', and my mother liked washing for Mrs. Moscrop better than for anyone else. That was because Mrs. Moscrop wrapped a bar of yellow soap in with the washing. There wasn't anyone else who thought of a thing like that. | Buy | |
| I, Robot | Isaac Asimov | I looked at my notes and I didn't like them. I'd spent three days at U.S. Robots and might as well have spent them at home with the Encyclopedia Tellurica. | Buy | |
| True History of the Kelly Gang | Peter Carey | I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false. | Buy | |
| Mr. Crewe | Winston Churchill | I may as well begin this story with Mr. Hilary Vane, more frequently addressed as the Honourable Hilary Vane, although it was the gentleman's proud boast that he had never held an office in his life. | Buy | |
| The Gabriel Hounds | Mary Stewart | I met him in the street called Straight. | Buy | |
| An American Dream | Norman Mailer | I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. | Buy | |
| Travels with My Aunt | Graham Henry Greene | I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a take-over by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother's funeral. | Buy | |
| The Enemy | Desmond Bagley | I met Penelope Ashton at a party thrown by Tom Packer. | Buy | |
| Simon the Jester | William John Locke | 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 Case of the Missing Message | Charles Spain Verral | I might as well explain right away that my name is Jimmy Carson and I live at 43 Maple Street in the town of Crestwood. | Buy | |
| The Old Men at the Zoo | Angus Wilson | I opened the large central window of my office room to its full on the fine early May morning. Then I stood for a few moments, breathing in the soft, warm air that was charged with the scent of white lilacs below. | Buy | |
| The Late Bourgeois World | Nadine Gordimer | I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead--" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say. | Buy | |
| Ficciones | Jorge Luis Borges | I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. | Buy | |
| The Pigskin Bag | Bruno Fischer | I phoned Redfern Motors from a drugstore on Flatbush Avenue. | Buy | |
| Trinity | Leon Uris | I recall with utter clarity the first great shock of my life. A scream came from the cottage next door. I rushed into the room, as familiar as my own home. The Larkin kids, Conor, Liam and Brigid, all hovered above the alcove in which a mattress of bog fir bedded old Kilty. They stood in gape-mouthed awe. | Buy | |
| Jaffery | William John Locke | 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 | |
| The Re-Creation of Brian Kent | Harold Bell Wright | I remember as well as though it were yesterday the first time I met Auntie Sue. | Buy | |
| The Houses in Between | Howard Spring (Robert Howard Spring) | I remember that I was dancing up and down. "Shall I see the Queen?" I cried. "Shall I see the Queen's husband? Shall I see--?" | Buy | |
| Truth | Jacqueline Sheehan | I rode to earth on the backside of a comet. | Buy | |
| The Dixie Association | Donald "Skip" Hays | I sat in my cell, packing my shit in a cardboard box. | Buy | |
| The Lonesome Gods | Louis L'Amour | 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 | |
| Eight Million Ways to Die | Lawrence Block | I saw her entrance. | Buy | |
| The Beach at Falesa | Robert Louis Stevenson | I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pinks, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces and smellt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing. I should say I had been for years on a low island near the line, living for the most part solitary among natives. Here was a fresh experience; even the tongue would be quite strange to me; and the look of these woods and mountains, and the rare smell of them, renewed my blood. | Buy | |
| The Sea Wolf | Jack London | I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth's credit. | Buy | |
| The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress | Robert A. Heinlein | I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect--and tax--public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. | Buy | |
| The Moon is a Harsh Mistress | Robert Heinlein | I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect - and tax - public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. | Buy | |
| Demian | Hermann Hesse | I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school. | Buy | |
| Memoirs | Hariette Wilson | I shall not say why and how I became at the age of fifteen, the Mistress of the Earl of Craven | Buy | |
| Memoirs | Harriet Wilson | I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven. | Buy | |
| Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett | I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. | Buy | |
| The Aeneid | Virgil | I sing of arms and the man. | Buy | |
| The Arrangement | Elia Kazan | I still haven't figured out my accident. | Buy | |
| The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon | I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. | Buy | |
| The White Peacock | D H Lawrence | I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill-pond | Buy | |
| The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling | Lawrence Block | I suppose he must have been in his early twenties. | Buy | |
| Of All the Bloody Cheek | Frank McAuliffe | I suppose it is only natural that invariably one of the first questions is: "What was the most interesting Commission ever accepted by the firm of Mandrell, Limited?" | Buy | |
| The Man Without a Country | Edward Everett Hale | I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York
Herald of August 13, 1863, observed, in an obscure corner,
among the "Deaths," the announcement,-- "NOLAN. Died, on board U.S. Corvette 'Levant,' Lat. 2o 11' S., Long. 131o W., on the 11th of May, PHILIP NOLAN." | Buy | |
| King Lear | William Shakespeare | I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. | Buy | |
| The German Money | Lev Raphael | I used to think that some people had a true gift for life, more than just a talent or even a skill. | Buy | |
| Nightmares & Dreamscapes | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | I waited and watched for seven years. I saw him come and go--Dolan. I watched him stroll into fancy restaurants dressed in a tuxedo, always with a different woman on his arm, always with his pair of bodyguards bookending him. I watched his hair go from iron-gray to a fashionable silver while my own simply receded until I was bald. | Buy | |
| The Tenth Insight | James Redfield | I walked out to the edge of the granite overhang and looked northward at the scene below. Stretching across my view was a large Appalachian valley of striking beauty, perhaps six or seven miles long and five miles wide. Along the length of the valley ran a winding stream that course through stretches of open meadowland and thick, colorful forests--old forests, with trees standing hundreds of feet high. | Buy | |
| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | Jack Grandison Finney | I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. It will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily explained. Not by me it won't, anyway. | Buy | |
| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | Jack Finney | I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. | Buy | |
| The Babe Ruth Story | Babe Ruth | I was a bad kid. | Buy | |
| Expensive People | Joyce Carol Oates | I was a child murderer. | Buy | |
| The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. | Washington Irving | I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town-crier. | Buy | |
| The Wreck of the Golden Mary | Charles Dickens | I was apprenticed to the Sea when I was twelve years old, and I have encountered a great deal of rough weather, both literal and metaphorical. | Buy | |
| Way of a Wanton | Richard S Prather | I was as confused as a sterile rabbit, primarily because I couldn't make up my mind where to look. | Buy | |
| Falstaff | Robert Nye | I was begotten on the giant of Cerne Abbas. | Buy | |
| The Adventurer | Mika Waltari | I was born and bred in a distant region that cosmographers call Finlandia, a beautiful and far-flung country unknown to most educated people. | Buy | |
| The Magus | John Fowles | I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. | Buy | |
| Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. | Buy | |
| Margot Asquith, an Autobiography | Margot Asquith | I was born in the country of Hogg and Scott between the Yarrow and the Tweed, in the year 1864. | Buy | |
| RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon | Richard Milhous Nixon | I was born in the house my father built. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Roderick Random | Tobias George Smollett | I was born in the northern part of this united kingdom, in the house of my grandfather; a gentleman of considerable fortune and influence, who had, on many occasions, signalised himself in behalf of his country; and was remarkable for his abilities in the law, which he exercised with great success, in the station of a judge, particularly against beggars, for whom he had a singular aversion. | Buy | |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe | I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznear; but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name, Crusoe, and so my companions always called me. | Buy | |
| World's Fair | E.L. Doctorow | I was born on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side. | Buy | |
| The Autobiography of a Supertramp | William Henry Davies | I was born thirty-five years ago, in a public house called the Church House, in the town of N---, in the county of M---. | Buy | |
| Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. | Buy | |
| The Crossing | Winston Churchill | I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters. | Buy | |
| Shosha | Isaac Bashevis Singer | I was brought up on three dead languages - Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish (some consider the last not a language at all) - and in a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud. | Buy | |
| Underworld | Don DeLillo | I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. | Buy | |
| Fire Sale | Sara Paretsky | I was halfway down the embankment when I saw the red-orange flash. | Buy | |
| The Dreadful Lemon Sky | John D MacDonald | I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of the bed, alone in a sweaty dream of chase, fear, and monstrous predators. | Buy | |
| The Thin Man | Dashiell Hammett | I was leaning against a bar in a speak-easy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. | Buy | |
| Time Out of Mind | Rachel Field | I was never one to begrudge people their memories. From a child I would listen when they spoke of the past. | Buy | |
| Murther and Walking Spirits | Robertson Davies | I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead. | Buy | |
| The Inheritors | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | I was on my third cup of coffee when the telephone began to ring. I let it ring. You wait three years for a phone call, you can wait thirty seconds more. | Buy | |
| Goodbye and Good Luck | Grace Paley | I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. | Buy | |
| Cider with Rosie | Laurie Lee | 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 | |
| The Pit and the Pendulum | Edgar Allan Poe | I was sick--sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence--the dread sentence of death--was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. | Buy | |
| The Betsy | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | I was sitting up in bed, sipping hot coffee, when the nurse came into the room. The English girl with the big tits. | Buy | |
| Lost Empires | J B Priestly | I was staying at Askrigg in Wensleydale, where I had gone to ramble and to do some painting. | Buy | |
| Devil in a Blue Dress | Walter Mosley | I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar. | Buy | |
| Texas | James A. Michener | I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town. | Buy | |
| Death of a Citizen | Donald Hamilton | I was taking a Martini across the room to my wife, who was still chatting with our host, Amos Darrel, the physicist, when the front door of the house opened and a man came in to join the party. | Buy | |
| A Place To Come To | Robert Penn Warren | I was the only boy, or girl either, in the public school in the town of Dugton, Claxford County, Alabama, whose father had ever got killed in the middle of the night standing up in the front of his wagon to piss on the hindquarters of one of a span of mules and, being drunk, pitching forward on his head, still hanging onto his dong, and hitting the pike in such a position and condition that both the left front and left rear wheels of the wagon rolled, with perfect precision, over his unconscious neck, his having passed out being, no doubt, the reason he took the fatal plunge in the first place. | Buy | |
| The Wreck of the Mary Deare | Hammond Innes | I was tired and very cold; a little scared, too. | Buy | |
| Landslide | Desmond Bagley | I was tired when I got off the bus at Fort Farrell. | Buy | |
| Steps | Jerzy N. Kosinski | I was traveling farther south. The villages were small and poor; each time I stopped in one, a crowd gathered around my car and the children followed my every move. | Buy | |
| A Hero of Our Time | Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov | 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 | |
| The Retaliators | Donald Hamilton | I was unexpectedly rich and I didn't like it. | Buy | |
| The Horse's Mouth | Joyce Cary | I was walking by the Thames. | Buy | |
| Augustus | John Edward Williams | I was with him at Actium, when the sword struck fire from metal, and the blood of soldiers was awash on deck and stained the blue Ionian Sea, and the javelin whistled in the air, and the burning hulls hissed upon the water, and the day was loud with the screams of men whose flesh roasted in the armor they could not fling off; and earlier I was with him at Mutina, where that same Marcus Antonius overran our camp and the sword was thrust into the empty bed where Caesar Augustus had lain, and where we persevered and earned the first power that was to give us the world; and at Philippi, where he traveled so ill he could not stand and yet made himself to be carried among his troops in a litter, and came near death again by the murderer of his father, and where he fought until the murderers of the mortal Julius, who became a god, were destroyed by their own hands. | Buy | |
| Living History | Hillary Rodham Clinton | I wasn't born a First Lady or a Senator. I wasn't born a Democrat. I wasn't born a lawyer or an advocate for women's rights and human rights. I wasn't born a wife or mother. I was born an American in the middle of the twentieth century, a fortunate time and place. I was free to make choices unavailable to past generations of women in my own country and inconceivable to many women in the world today. I came of age on the crest of tumultuous social change and took part in the political battles fought over the meaning of America and its role in the world. | Buy | |
| Goldfish | Raymond Chandler | I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling. | Buy | |
| The Lords of Discipline | Pat Conroy | I wear the ring. | Buy | |
| A Separate Peace | John Knowles | I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before. | Buy | |
| Kidnapped | Robert Louis Stevenson | I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house. | Buy | |
| Kidnapped | Robert Louis Stevenson | I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house. | Buy | |
| English Journey | J B Priestly | I will begin, I said, where a man might well first land, at Southampton. | Buy | |
| Bridget Jones's Diary | Helen Fielding | I will not drink more than fourteen alcohol unit a week. | Buy | |
| Beau Sabreur | Percival Christopher Wren | I will start at the very nadir of my fortunes, at their very lowest depths, and you will see them rise to their zenith, that highest point where they are crowned by Failure. | Buy | |
| The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Laurence Sterne | I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me. | Buy | |
| Operating Instructions | Anne Lamott | 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 | |
| King Henry the Sixth, Part III | William Shakespeare | I wonder how the king escaped our hands? | Buy | |
| I Capture the Castle | Dodie Smith | I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cozy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring--I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. | Buy | |
| Night of the Toads | Michael Collins | I'd never remembered the girl if Ricardo Vega had been another man. | Buy | |
| The Taming of the Shrew | William Shakespeare | I'll feeze you, in faith. | Buy | |
| Left Hand of Darkness | Ursula Le Guin | 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 | |
| Double in Trouble | Richard S Prather and Stephen Marlowe | I'm a private eye. | Buy | |
| Lydia Bailey | Kenneth Lewis Roberts | I'm not over-enthusiastic about books that teach or preach, but I may as well admit in the beginning that my primary reason for writing this book was to teach as many as possible of those who come after me how much hell and ruin are inevitably brought on innocent people and innocent countries by men who make a virtue of consistency. | Buy | |
| What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day | Pearl Cleage | I'm sitting at the bar in the airport, minding my own business, trying to get psyched up for my flight, and I made the mistake of listening to one of those TV talk shows. | Buy | |
| The Queen of the Damned | Anne Rice | I'm the Vampire Lestat. Remember me? The vampire who became a super rock star, the one who wrote the autobiography? The one with the blond hair and the gray eyes, and the insatiable desire for visibility and fame? You remember. | Buy | |
| Bastard Out Of Carolina | Dorothy Allison | I've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne | Buy | |
| The Ax | Donald E Westlake | I've never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. | Buy | |
| Candy | Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg | I've read many books," said Professor Mephesto, with an odd finality, wearily flattening his hands on the podium, addressing the seventy-six sophomores who sat in easy reverence, immortalizing his every phrase with their pads and pens, and now, as always, giving him the confidence to slowly, artfully dramatize his words, to pause, shrug, frown, gaze abstractly at the ceiling, allow a wan wistful smile to play at his lips, and repeat quietly, "many books . . ." | Buy | |
| Quinn's Book | William Kennedy | I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinn's, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of the aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan Magdalena Colón, also known as La Última, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river's icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes' gold and yielded free to Diogenes, the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller. | Buy | |
| The Egyptian | Mika Waltari | I, Sinuhe, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this. I do not write it to the glory of the gods in the land of Kem, for I am weary of gods, nor to the glory of the Pharaohs, for I am weary of their deeds. I write neither from fear nor from any hope of the future but for myself alone. During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come. | Buy | |
| I, Claudius | Robert Graves | I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius", am now about ot write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest chilhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. | Buy | |
| Island in the Sea of Time | S M Stirling | Ian Arnstein stepped off the ferry gangway and hefted his bags. | Buy | |
| Double Star | Robert A. Heinlein | If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he's a spaceman. | Buy | |
| Lorna Doone | Richard Doddridge Blackmore | If anybody cares to read a simple tale told simply, I, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, in the county of Somerset, yeoman and churchwarden, have seen and had a share in some doings of this neighborhood, which I will try to set down in order, God sparing my life and memory. | Buy | |
| The Road to Understanding | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | If Burke Denby had not given all the frosted cakes and toy shotguns he wanted at the age of ten, it might not have been so difficult to convince him at the age of twenty that he did not want to marry Helen Barnet. | Buy | |
| Trader | Charles de Lint | 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 | |
| Hotel | Arthur Hailey | If he had his way, Peter McDermott thought, he would have fired the chief house detective long ago. But he had not had his way and now, once more, the obese ex-policeman was missing when he was needed most. | Buy | |
| Herzog | Saul Bellow | If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me thought Moses Herzog. | Buy | |
| Peter Simple | Captain Frederick Marryat | If I cannot narrate a life of adventurous and daring exploits, fortunately I have no heavy crimes to confess: and, if I do not rise in the estimation of the reader for acts of gallantry and devotion in my country's cause, at least I may claim the merit of zealous and persevering continuance in my vocation. We are all of us variously gifted from Above, and he who is content to walk, instead of to run, on his allotted path through life, although he may not so rapidly attain the goal, has the advantage of not being out of breath upon his arrival. | Buy | |
| Peter Simple | Captain Maryatt | If I cannot narrate a life of adventurous and daring exploits, fortunately I have no heavy crimes to confess; and, if I do not rise in the estimation of the reader for acts of gallantry and devotion in my country's cause, at least I may claim the merit of zealous and perservering continuance in my vocation. | Buy | |
| The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint | Brady Udall | If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation. | Buy | |
| The Soldier | Rupert Brooke | If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. | Buy | |
| The Master of the World | Jules Verne | If I speak of myself in this story, it is because I have been deeply involved in its startling events, events doubtless among the most extraordinary which this twentieth century will witness. Sometimes I even ask myself if all this has really happened, if its pictures dwell in truth in my memory, and not merely in my imagination. | Buy | |
| Ronald Reagan: An American Life | Ronald Reagan | If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I
would never have left Illinois. I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go--and a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression. | Buy | |
| The Enemy Camp | Jerome Weidman | If it was trouble you were after, Miss Akst was your girl. | Buy | |
| Now It's Time to Say Goodbye | Dale Peck | If it's after midnight it's my birthday. | Buy | |
| Twelfth Night, or, What You Will | William Shakespeare | If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again. It had a dying fall; O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breaths upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor. | Buy | |
| Erewhon | Samuel Butler | If the reader will excuse me, I will say nothing of my antecedents, nor of the circumstances which led me to leave my native country, the narrative would be tedious to him and painful to myself. Suffice it, that when I left home it was with the intention of going to some new colony, and either finding, or even perhaps purchasing, waste crown land suitable for cattle or sheep farming, by which means I thought that I could better my fortunes more rapidly than in England. | Buy | |
| Pictures from Italy | Charles Dickens | If the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their credentials for the different places which are the subject of its author's reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of what they are to expect. | Buy | |
| Where the Sidewalk Ends | Sheldon Allan Silverstein (used pseudonym Uncle Shelby) | If you are a dreamer, come in, If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer. . . If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! | Buy | |
| The Bad Beginning | Lemony Snicket | If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. | Buy | |
| Cappy Ricks Retires | Peter B Kyne | If you have read previous tales of the Blue Star Navigation Company and the various brisk individuals connected therewith, you will recall one Michael J. Murphy, who first came to the attention of Cappy Ricks at the time he, the said Murphy, was chief kicker of the barkentine Retriever under Captain Matt Peasley. | Buy | |
| If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things | Jon McGregor | If you listen, you can hear it. | Buy | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. | Buy | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J D Salinger | If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. | Buy | |
| The Winter's Tale | William Shakespeare | If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great differences betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia. | Buy | |
| The White Deer | James Thurber | If you should walk and wind and wander far enough on one of those afternoons in April when smoke goes down instead of up, and nearby things sound far away and far things near, you are more than likely to come at last to the enchanted forest that lies between the Moonstone Mines and Centaurs Mountain. | Buy | |
| Mary Poppins | P L Travers | If you want to find Cherry Tree Lane all you have to do is ask a policeman at the crossroads. | Buy | |
| Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley | Talbot Mundy | If you want views about the world's news, read what Cottswold Ommony calls the views papers; there is plenty in them that thoroughly zealous people believe. | Buy | |
| The Austere Academy | Lemony Snicket | If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn't give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway. | Buy | |
| War With the Newts | Karel Capek | If you were to look for the little island of Tana Masa on a map
you would find it right on the equator slightly to the west of
Sumatra. But if you asked Captain J. van Toch of the Kandong
Bandoeng what kind of place this Tana Masa was, the place off
which he had just dropped anchor, he would curse for a while and
then he would tell you that it was the filthiest hole in all the
Sunda Islands, even more miserable than Tana Bala and at least as
lousy a place as Pini or Banjak; that the only, if you excuse me, human being living there--disregarding, of course, those lousy Batkas--was a drunken agent, a cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese and an even greater thief, heathen and swine than a pure-bred Cuban and a pure-bred white man combined; and if there was something lousy in this world then it was this lousy life on this lousy Tana Masa, yessir. | Buy | |
| Choke | Chuck Palahnuik | If you're going to read this, don't brother. | Buy | |
| Oblomov | Ivan Goncharov | Ilya Ilyich Oblomov was lying in bed one morning in his flat in Gorokhovaya Street in one of those large houses which have as many inhabitants as a country town. | Buy | |
| The Fourth Hand | John Irving | Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event--the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age. | Buy | |
| Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus | John Gray | Imagine that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. One day long ago the Martians, looking through their telescopes, discovered the Venusians. Just glimpsing the Venusians awakened feelings they had never known. They fell in love and quickly invented space travel and flew to Venus. | Buy | |
| Lord Vanity | Samuel Shellabarger | In 1757, the Villa Bagnoli, Count Widiman's mansion on the outskirts of Mira, was not the most and not the least splendid of the hundred and forty country palaces between Padua and Fusina, which formed the core of the Venetian summer colony. | Buy | |
| Les Misérables | Victor Hugo | In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D---- | Buy | |
| Miss Bishop | Bess Streeter Aldrich | In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream. | Buy | |
| Ragtime | E L Doctrow | In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. | Buy | |
| The Beautiful and the Damned | F. Scott Fitzgerald | In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. | Buy | |
| A Stranger in the Mirror | Sidney Sheldon | In 1919, Detroit, Michigan, was the single most successful industrial city in the world. World War I had ended, and Detroit had played a significant part in the Allies' victory, supplying them with tanks and trucks and aeroplanes. Now with the threat of the Hun over, the automobile plants once again turned their energies to retooling for motorcars. | Buy | |
| Witness | Whittaker Chambers | In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. | Buy | |
| Return to Paradise | James A. Michener | In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled." | Buy | |
| The Russia House | John Le Carre | In a broad Moscow street not two hundred yards from the Leningrad station, on the upper floor of an ornate and hideous hotel built by Stalin in the style known to Muscovites as Empire During the Plague, the British Council's first ever audio fair for the teaching of the English language and the spread of British culture was grinding to its excruciating end. | Buy | |
| The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house. | Buy | |
| Peregrine Pickle | Tobias George Smollett | In a certain county of England, bounded on one side by the sea, and at the distance of one hundred miles from the metropolis, lived Gamaliel Pickle Esq; the father of that hero whose adventures we propose to record. | Buy | |
| The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything she did offended someone. | Buy | |
| The Hobbit | J R R Tolkien | In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. | Buy | |
| The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. | Buy | |
| Rory O'More | Samuel Lover | 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 | |
| Twenty Years After | Alexandre Dumas | In a room of the Palais-Cardinal which we already know, near a table with silver gilt corners, loaded with papers and books, a man was sitting, his head resting in his hands. | Buy | |
| Poland | James A. Michener | In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow. | Buy | |
| Needful Things | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news. | Buy | |
| Hard Cash | Charles Reade | In a snowy villa, with a sloping lawn, just outside the great
commercial seaport, Barkington, there live a few years ago a
happy family. A lady, middle-aged, but still charming, two young
friends of hers, and a periodical visitor. The lady was Mrs. Dodd; her occasional visitor was her husband; her friends were her son Edward, aged twenty, and her daughter Julia, nineteen; the fruit of a misalliance. | Buy | |
| Twenty Years After | Alexandre Dumas pere | In a splendid chamber of the Palais Royal, formerly styled the Palais Cardinal, a man was sitting in deep reverie, his head supported on his hands, leaning over a gilt and inlaid table which was covered with letters and papers. Behind this figure glowed a vast fireplace alive with leaping flames; great logs of oak blazed and crackled on the polished brass andirons whose flicker shone upon the superb habiliments of the lonely tenant of the room, which was illumined grandly by twin candelabra rich with wax-lights. | Buy | |
| Baghdad Sketches | Freya | In a very short time a railway will link Baghdad with Europe. | Buy | |
| Mating | Norman Rush | In Africa, you want more, I think. | Buy | |
| Fanshawe | Nathaniel Hawthorne | In an ancient though not very populous settlement, in a retired corner of one of the New England states, arise the walls of a seminary of learning, which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled "Harley College." | Buy | |
| East Lynne | Mrs. Henry Wood | In an easy chair of the spacious and handsome library of his town-house, sat William, Earl of Mount Severn. | Buy | |
| Madeline | Ludwig Bemelmans | In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. | Buy | |
| The Story of King Arthur and his Knights | Howard Pyle | In ancient days there lived a very noble King, named Uther-Pendragon, and he became Overlord of all of Britain. This King was very greatly aided unto the achievement of the Pendragonship of the realm by the help of two men, who rendered him great assistance in all that he did. | Buy | |
| Twelve Men | Theodore Dreiser | In any group of men I have ever known, speaking from the point of view of character and not that of physical appearance, Peter would stand out as deliciously and irrefutably different. In the great waste of American intellectual dreariness he was an oasis, a veritable spring in the desert. He understood life. He knew men. He was free--spiritually, morally, in a thousand ways, it seemed to me. | Buy | |
| The Ranch | Danielle Steel | In any other supermarket, the woman walking down the aisle, pushing a cart between canned good and gourmet spices, would have looked strangely out of place. | Buy | |
| Scruples | Judith Krantz | In Beverly Hills only the infirm and senile do not drive their own cars. The local police are accustomed to odd combinations of vehicle and driver: the stately, nearsighted retired banker making an illegal left-hand turn in his Dino Ferrari, the teen-ager speeding to a tennis lesson in a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce Corniche, the matronly civic leader blithely parking her bright red Jaguar at a bus stop. | Buy | |
| All's Well That Ends Well | William Shakespeare | In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband. | Buy | |
| September | Rosamunde Pilcher | In early May, the summer came, at last, to Scotland. Winter had clung, with steely fingers, for far too long, refusing to relinquish its cruel grip. All through April, bitter winds had blown from the north-west, tearing the first blossom from the wild geynes, and burning brown the yellow trumpets of the early daffodils. Snow frosted the hilltops and lay deep in corries, and the farmers, despairing of fresh grazing, tractored the last of their feed out to the barren fields where lowing stock huddled in the shelter of the drystone walls. | Buy | |
| Lucy Gayheart | Willa Sibert Cather | In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart. | Buy | |
| Midnight Cowboy | James Leo Herlihy | In his new boots, Joe Buck was six-foot-one and life was different. As he walked out of that store in Houston something snapped in the whole bottom half of him: A kind of power he never even knew was there had been released in his pelvis and he was able to feel the world through it. | Buy | |
| Amber Brown is Not a Crayon | Paula Danziger | In just ten minutes, our entire class is getting on a plane for our flight to China. | Buy | |
| Under a Wing | Reeve Lindbergh | 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 | |
| The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Michael Chabon | In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. | Buy | |
| Mythago Wood | Robert P. Holdstock | In May 1944 I received my call-up papers and went reluctantly away to war, training at first in the Lake District, then shipping over to France with the 7th Infantry. | Buy | |
| Le Morte d’Arthur | Sir Thomas Malory (used pseudonym Morte d'Arthur) | In May when every lusty heart flourisheth and burgeoneth, for as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoice and gladden of summer coming with his fresh flowers: for winter with his rough winds and blasts causeth a lusty man and woman to cower, and sit fast by the fire. So in this season, as in the month of May, it befell a great anger and unhap that stinted not till the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed and slain; and all was long upon two unhappy knights, the which were named Agravaine and Sir Mordred, that were brethren unto Sir Gawiane. | Buy | |
| The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood | Howard Pyle | In merry England in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades. | Buy | |
| Swan Song | John Galsworthy | In modern Society, one thing after another, this spice on that, ensures a kind of memoristic vacuum, and Fleur Mont's passage of arms with Majorie Ferrar was, by the spring of 1926, well-nigh forgotten. | Buy | |
| East Coker | T.S. Eliot | In my beginning is my end. | Buy | |
| Four Quartets--East Coker | T.S. Eliot | In my beginning is my end. | Buy | |
| The Window at the White Cat | Mary Roberts Rinehart | In my criminal work anything that wears skirts is a lady, until the law proves her otherwise. From the frayed and slovenly petticoats of the woman who owns a poultry stand in the market and who has grown wealthy by selling chickens at twelve ounces to the pound, or the silk sweep of Mamie Tracy, whose diamonds have been stolen down on the avenue, or the staidly respectable black and middle-aged skirt of the client whose husband has found an affinity partial to laces and fripperies, and has run off with her–all the wearers are ladies, and as such announced by Hawes. In fact, he carries it to excess. | Buy | |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some
advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." | Buy | |
| The Great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald | In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. | Buy | |
| The Studs Lonigan Trilogy | James T. Farrell | In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the "drugstore cowboy" micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley's Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession. | Buy | |
| She's Come Undone | Wally Lamb | 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 | |
| Valentine Vox | Henry Cockton | In one of the most ancient and populous boroughs in the county of Suffolk, there resided a genius named Valentine Vox, who, in order to make a fortune with rapidity, tried everything, but failed to succeed in anything, because he could stick long to nothing. | Buy | |
| Night and Morning | Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton | In one of the Welsh counties is a small village called A-----. It is somewhat removed from the high road, and is, therefore, but little known to those luxurious amateurs of the picturesque, who view nature through the windows of a carriage and four. | Buy | |
| Crotchet Castle | Thomas Love Peacock | In one of those beautiful valleys, through which the Thames (not yet polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities, or even the minor defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey), rolls a clear flood through flowery meadows, under the shade of old beech woods, and the smooth glossy greensward of the chalk hills (which pour into it their tributary rivulets, as pure and pellucid as the fountain of Bandusium, or the wells of Scamander, by which the wives and daughters of the Trojans washed their splendid garments in the days of peace, before the coming of the Greeks); in one of those beautiful valleys, on a bold round-surfaced lawn, spotted with junipers, that opened itself in the bosom of an old wood, which rose with a steep, but not precipitous ascent, from the river to the summit of the hill, stood the castellated villa of a retired citizen. | Buy | |
| A River Runs Through It | Norman MacLean | In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. | Buy | |
| Darkness Visible | William Styron | In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind--a struggle which had engaged me for several months--might have a fatal outcome. | Buy | |
| Don't Go Near the Water | William Clark Brinkley | In peacetime Lieutenant Commander Clinton T. Nash had been in charge of a Merill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Beane office in the Midwest. Not long after Pearl Harbor he had been commissioned directly from his brokerage office without the corrupting effect of any intervening naval training. | Buy | |
| Schindler's List | Thomas Keneally | In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and--in the lapel of the dinner jacket--a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine. | Buy | |
| The Deep | Peter Benchley | In sea water more than a few feet deep, blood is green. Water filters the light from above, seeming to consume the colors of the spectrum shade by shade. Red is the first to succumb, to disappear. Green lasts longer. But then, below 100 feet, green, too, fades away, leaving blue. In the twilight depths--180, 200 feet, and beyond,--blood looks black. | Buy | |
| The Book of Virtues | William J Bennett | In self-discipline one makes a "disciple" of oneself. One is one's own teacher, trainer, coach, and "disciplinarian." It is an odd sort of relationship, paradoxical in its own way, and many of us don't handle it very well. | Buy | |
| Demons | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | In setting out to describe the recent and very strange events that took place in our town, hitherto not remarkable for anything, I am forced, for want of skill, to begin somewhat far back--namely, with some biographical details concerning the talented and much esteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Let these details serve merely as an introduction to the chronicle presented here, while the story itself, which I am intending to relate, still lies ahead. | Buy | |
| Time and Again | Jack Grandison Finney | In shirt-sleeves, the way I generally worked, I sat sketching a bar of soap taped to an upper corner of my drawing board. The gold-foil wrapper was carefully peeled back so that you could still read most of the brand name printed on it; I'd spoiled the wrappers of half a dozen bars before getting that effect. This was a new idea, the product to be shown ready for what the accompanying copy called "fragrant, lathery, lovelier you" use, and I had the job of sketching it into a half a dozen layouts, the bar of soap at a slightly different angle in each. | Buy | |
| The Merchant of Venice | William Shakespeare | In sooth I know not why I am so sad. | Buy | |
| Mr. Isaacs | Francis Marion Crawford | In spite of Jean-Jacques and his school, men are not everywhere born free, any more than they are everywhere in chains, unless these be of their own individual making. | Buy | |
| The History of Sir Richard Calmady | Lucas Malet | In that fortunate hour of English history, when the cruel sights and haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the Surrey Hills. | Buy | |
| The Good Shepherd | C S Forester | In that hour after dawn the horizon did not seem far away. | Buy | |
| Drivin' Woman | Elizabeth Pickett Chevalier | In that opaque land between sleep and wakefulness, she wrestled anxiously with the giant of her future. How could she, a girl--single-handed--restore the old way of life to Virginia in time to assure suitable marriages to herself and her three younger sisters. | Buy | |
| The New Life | Dante | In that part of the book of my memory before the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova. Under such rubric I find written many things; and among them the words which I purpose to copy into this little book; if not all of them, at the least their substance. | Buy | |
| Sula | Toni Morrison | In that place, where they tore the night shade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. | Buy | |
| Ivanhoe | Walter Dill Scott | In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. | Buy | |
| Ivanhoe | Sir Walter Scott | In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the River Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest. | Buy | |
| Nemesis | Agatha Christie | In the afternoon it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper | Buy | |
| The Prince and the Pauper | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him. | Buy | |
| The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices | Charles Dickens | In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, wherein these presents bear date, two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employer. | Buy | |
| Smoke Bellew | Jack London | 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 | |
| Evergreen | Belva Plain | In the beginning there was a warm room with a table, a black iron stove and red-flowered wallpaper. The child lay on a cot feeling the good heat while the mother mover peacefully from the table to the stove. When the mother sang her small voice quavered over the lulling nonsense-words; the song was meant to be gay but the child felt sadness in it. | Buy | |
| The Forest and the Fort | Hervey Allen | In the beginning was the forest. God made it and no man knew the end of it. | Buy | |
| Lasher | Anne Rice | In the beginning was the voice of Father. | Buy | |
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving | In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. | Buy | |
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irvine | In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town | Buy | |
| Headed for a Hearse | Jonathan Latimer | In the cell to the right, a man was still crying. | Buy | |
| The Dynamiter | Robert Louis Stevenson | In the city of encounters, the Bagdad of the West, and, to be more precise, on the broad northern pavement of Leicester Square, two young men of five- or six-and-twenty met after years of separation. | Buy | |
| Silas Marner | George Eliot | In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. | Buy | |
| Silas Marner | George Eliot | In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses -- and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak -- there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. | Buy | |
| The Ghost | Danielle Steel | In the driving rain of a November day, the cab from London to Heathrow took forever. It was so dark it looked like late afternoon, and Charlie Waterston could barely see out the windows as familiar landmarks slid past him. | Buy | |
| The Brass Bowl | Louis Joseph Vance | In the dull hot dusk of a summer's day a green touring-car, swinging out of the East Drive, pulled up smartly, trembling, at the edge of the Fifty-ninth Street car-tracks, then more sedately, under the dispassionate eye of a mounted member of the Traffic Squad, lurched across the Plaza and merged itself in the press of vehicles south-bound on the Avenue. | Buy | |
| The U.P. Trail | Zane Grey | In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines of cottonwoods to a slow, vast heave of rising ground--Wyoming--where the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and the camp-fire of the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from beside some lonely stream; . . . | Buy | |
| A Man For The Ages | Irving Bacheller | In the early summer of 1831 Samson Traylor and his wife, Sarah, and two children left their old home near the village of Vergennes, Vermont, and began their travels toward the setting sun with four chairs, a bread board and rolling-pin, a feather bed and blankets, a small looking-glass, a skillet, an axe, a pack basket with a pad of sole leather on the same, a water pail, a box of dishes, a tub of salt pork, a rifle, a tea-pot, a sack of meal, sundry small provisions and a violin, in a double wagon drawn by oxen. | Buy | |
| In Another Country | Ernest Hemingway | In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. | Buy | |
| The Unlimited Dream Company | James Graham Ballard | In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft? | Buy | |
| The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosinski | In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a six year old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village. | Buy | |
| Hypatia | Charles Kingsley | In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand. | Buy | |
| The Man With the Dancing Eyes | Sophie Dahl | In the golden half-light of a midsummer's evening, the sort where any kind of magic can occur, and often does, in the midst of a party held in a wild and rambling garden, stood Pierre, teetering on highly unsuitable heels, surrounded by a symphony of overripe roses. | Buy | |
| Goodnight Moon | Margaret Wise Brown | In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon. | Buy | |
| A Shade of Difference | Allen Stuart Drury | In the great pearl-gray slab of a room that is the North Delegates' Lounge of the United Nations in New York the late-September sun slanted down through the massive east windows and fell across the green carpets, the crowded chairs and sofas, the little knots of delegates standing or sitting or milling about in the midmorning hours before the General Assembly's seven committees began. | Buy | |
| The Romance of War | James Grant | In the Highlands of Perthshire, a deadly feud had existed from time immemorial, between the Lisles of Inchavon and the Stuarts of Lochisla. In the days when the arm of the law was weak, the proprietors had often headed their kinsmen and followers in encounters with the sword, and for the last time during the memorable civil war of 1745-6. | Buy | |
| Sing Sing Nights | Harry Stephen Keeler | In the large, square death-cell a sudden peculiar quiet had fallen upon four men of different nationalities. | Buy | |
| Still Life With Woodpecker | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui--for something momentous to occur. | Buy | |
| Still Life with Woodpecker | Tom Robbins | In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting - with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui - for something momentous to occur. | Buy | |
| The Sot-Weed Factor | John Barth | In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and sting-taut with similes stretched to the snapping point. | Buy | |
| Tide of Empire | Peter B Kyne | In the late spring of 1848 a mounted man, herding before him two pack-animals, paused at timber-line in the mouth of a pass through the formidable range which forms the principal barrier between California and Nevada and which since has been named, for no particular reason--for such is the paucity of men's imaginations--the White Mountains. | Buy | |
| The Great Rascal | Jay Monaghan | In the late summer of 1869 a short man with a seamed and weatherbeaten face limped down the steep steps of a Union Pacific coach at North Platte, Nebraska. | Buy | |
| A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. | Buy | |
| Barchester Towers | Anthony Trollope | In the latter days of July in the year 185-, an most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the cathedral city of Barchester, and answered every hour in various ways - Who was to be the new Bishop? | Buy | |
| Kindred of the Dust | Peter Bernard Kyne | In the living-room of The Dreamerie, his home on Tyee Head, Hector McKaye, owner of the Tyee Lumber Company and familiarly known as "The Laird," was wont to sit in his hours of leisure, smoking and building castles in Spain--for his son Donald. | Buy | |
| Kindred of the Dust | Peter B Kyne | In the living-room of The Dreamerie, his home on Tyee Head, Hector McKaye, owner of the Tyee Lumber Company and familiarly known as "The Laird," was wont to sit in his hours of leisure, smoking and building castles in Spain--for his son Donald. | Buy | |
| The Food of the Gods | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists." | Buy | |
| October Suite | Maxine Clair | In the Midwest, October comes in when the pale coverlet of sky lifts away, exposing an eternity of deep and certain blue. | Buy | |
| So Little Time | John Phillips Marquand | In the mornings when they were in the city, they had breakfast on a card table in Jeffrey's study. | Buy | |
| Ringworld | Larry Niven | In the night time heat of Beirut in one of a row of general address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality. | Buy | |
| Facial Justice | Leslie Poles Hartley | In the not very distant future, after the Third World War, Justice had made great strides. Legal Justice, Economic Justice, Social Justice, and many other forms of justice, of which we do not know the names, had been attained; but there still remained spheres of human relationship and activity in which Justice did not reign. | Buy | |
| The Courtship of Miles Standish | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 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 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. | Buy | |
| Siddharta | Hermann Hesse | In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig trees, Siddharta, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda. | Buy | |
| A Perfect Spy | John Le Carre | In the small hours of a blustery October morning in a south Devon coastal town that seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants, Magnus Pym got out of his elderly country taxicab and, having paid the driver and waited till he had left, struck out across the church square. | Buy | |
| Voices of Hope | David Feintuch | In the soft summer evening, Senator Richard Boland paced the den of out Washington compound. | Buy | |
| Mildred Pierce | James M. Cain | In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale, California, a man was bracing trees. | Buy | |
| Paris Trout | Pete Dexter | In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia. | Buy | |
| Jubilee Trail | Gwen Bristow | In the summer of 1844, Garnet Cameron graduated from Miss Wayne's Select Academy for Young Ladies. This was a boarding-school on a country estate in upper Manhattan, and Garnet had been a pupil there for four years. On graduation day she was awarded three medals: for music, horsemanship, and politeness. | Buy | |
| The Valley of the Giants | Peter B Kyne | In the summer of 1850 a topsail schooner slipped into the cove under Trinidad Head and dropped anchor at the edge of the kelp-fields. | Buy | |
| The Eighth Day | Thornton Niven Wilder | In the summer of 1902 John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at one in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution. | Buy | |
| George's Mother | Stephen Crane | In the swirling rain that came at dusk the broad avenue glistened with that deep bluish tint which is so widely condemned when it is put into pictures. | Buy | |
| Billy Budd | Herman Melville | In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war's men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty. | Buy | |
| Nostromo | Joseph Conrad | In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. | Buy | |
| Twenty-Three Tales | Leo Tolstoy (Count Lev Tolstoi) | In the town of Vladímir lived a young merchant named Ivan Dmitritch Aksyonof. He had two shops and a house of his own. | Buy | |
| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. | Buy | |
| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. | Buy | |
| Windsor Castle | William Harrison Ainsworth | In the twentieth year of the reign of the right high and puissant King Henry the Eighth, namely, in 1529, on the twenty-first of April, and on one of the loveliest evenings that ever fell on the loveliest district in England, a fair youth, having somewhat the appearance of a page, was leaning over the terrace-wall on the north side of Windsor Castle, and gazing at the magnificent scene before him. | Buy | |
| Dune | Frank Herbert | In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul. | Buy | |
| The Definite Object | Jeffrey Farnol | In the writing of books, as all the world knows, two things are above all other things essential--the one is to know exactly when and where to leave off, and the other to be equally certain when and where to begin. | Buy | |
| Barnaby Rudge | Charles Dickens | In the year 1775, ther stood upon the borders of Epping Forrest, at a distance of about twelve miles fom London - measuring from the Standard in Cornhill, or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in the days of yore - a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportionsd that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman drew. | Buy | |
| Around the World in Eighty Days | Jules Verne | In the year 1872, No. 7 Savile Rowe, Burlington Gardens--the house where Sheridan died in 1814--was occupied by Phileas Fogg, Esq. | Buy | |
| A Study in Scarlet | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. | Buy | |
| Mission Earth | L. Ron Hubbard | In these days of bad and alarming literature that teaches violence and fantasy to our young, it is with pleasure that I accept the invitation to write a forward to this extravagant and overly imaginative work. | Buy | |
| Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens | In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in. | Buy | |
| Sophie's Choice | William Styron | In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. | Buy | |
| The History of Troilus and Cressida | William Shakespeare | In Troy there likes the scene. From isles of Greece The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed, Have to the port of Athens sent their ships, Fraught with the ministers and instruments Of cruel war. | Buy | |
| The Man in the Yellow Raft | C S Forester | In United States destroyer Boon the babies had grown into adolescents overnight apparently, and all the troubles associated with adolescence were making their appearance. | Buy | |
| Peyton Place | Grace Metalious | Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one in never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. | Buy | |
| I Was Dora Suarez | Derek Raymond | Interrupted by her because she had come to see what was happening next door while he was still finishing up with the girl, the killer came up to the old woman without a word, got hold of her as if she were a load of last week's rubbish and hurled her through the front of her grandfather clock which stood just inside the door of the flat, using strength that even he didn't know he had. | Buy | |
| The Luck of the Bodkins | Pelham Grenville Wodehouse | Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. | Buy | |
| A Bell for Adano | John Hersey | Invasion had come to the town of Adano. | Buy | |
| Requiem for Harlem | Henry Roth | Ira Stigman's legs were weary, legs and feet and instep, but the long march was well worth its fatigue. | Buy | |
| Dead and Buried | Howard Engel | Irma Dowden looked over my office. | Buy | |
| In America | Susan Sontag | Irresolute, no shivering, I'd crashed a party in the private dining room of a hotel. | Buy | |
| Middle Age | Joyce Carol Oates | Is this fair? You leave your home in Salthill-on-Hudson on the
muggy afternoon of July Fourth for a cookout (an invitation you
didn't really want to accept, but somehow accepted) and return
days later as ashes in a cheesy-looking funeral urn: bone chunks
and chips and coarse gritty powder to be dumped out, scattered,
and raked in the crumbly soil of your own garden. Fertilizer for weeds. | Buy | |
| Go Down, Moses | William Faulkner | Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in the land. | Buy | |
| The Kiss | Danielle Steel | Isabelle Forrester stood looking down at the garden from her bedroom window, in the house on the rue de Grenelle, in the seventh arrondissement in Paris. It was the house she and Gordon had lived in for the past twenty years, and both her children had been born there. It has been built in the eighteenth century, and had tall, imposing bronze door on the street that led to the inner courtyard. The house was familiar and old and beautiful, with tall ceiling and splendid boiseries, lovely moldings, and parquet floors the color of brandy. | Buy | |
| A Rough Shoot | Geoffrey Household | It all began on an autumn evening so silent and peaceful that no one who had the luck to be out-of-doors, with copse and downland stretching away from him till the folds of England vanished into a mist of grey and green, could have a thought of human violence. | Buy | |
| On Wings of Eagles | Ken Follett | It all started on December 5, 1978. Jay Coburn, Director of Personnel for EDS Corporation Iran, sat in his office in uptown Tehran with a lot on his mind. | Buy | |
| The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner | James Hogg | It appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, that the lands of Dalcastle (or Dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of Colwan, about one hundred and fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to that period. | Buy | |
| Dreamcatcher | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | It became their motto, and Jonesy couldn't for the life of him remember which of them started saying it first. Payback's a bitch, that was his. | Buy | |
| Le Morte d’Arthur | Sir Thomas Malory (used pseudonym Morte d'Arthur) | It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. And the duke was called the duke of Tintagil. | Buy | |
| Le Morte D'Arthur | Thomas Malory | It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time | Buy | |
| The Enchanted April | Countess Elizabeth von Arnim | It began in a woman's club in London on a February afternoon,--an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon--when Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless eye down the Agony Column saw this: To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times. That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment. | Buy | |
| Act of Fear | Michael Collins | It began with the mugging of the cop. | Buy | |
| The Summons | John Grisham | It came by mail, regular postage, the old-fashioned way since the Judge was almost eighty and distrusted modern devices. | Buy | |
| The Gift Horse | Frank Gruber | It didn't take much to make Johnny Fletcher happy. | Buy | |
| After Many a Summer | Aldous Huxley | It had all been arranged by telegram, Jeremy Pordage was to look out for a coloured chauffeur in a grey uniform with a carnation in his button-hole; and the coloured chauffeur was to look out for a middle-aged Englishman carrying the Poetical Works of Wordsworth. In spite of the crowds at the station, they found one another without difficulty. | Buy | |
| Morte D'Urban | James Farl Powers | It had been a lucky day for the Order of St. Clement the day Mr. Billy Cosgrove entered the sacristy of a suburban church after Mass and shook the hand of Father Urban. | Buy | |
| Three Loves Had Margaret | James Hilton | It had certainly been a wonderful week, and Margaret, almost twenty-one and driving to Paddington Station after her first visit to London, felt that it would have been absolutely perfect if only Pommy had been with them as well. | Buy | |
| Blix | Frank Norris | It had just struck nine from the cuckoo clock that hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room, when Victorine brought in the halved watermelon and set if in front of Mr. Bessemer's plate. | Buy | |
| Magnificent Obsession | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | It had lately become common chatter at Brightwood Hospital--better known for three hundred miles around Detroit as Hudson's Clinic--that the chief was all but dead on his feet. | Buy | |
| George Silverman's Explanation | Charles Dickens | It happened in this wise - | Buy | |
| The Story of King Arthur and his Knights | Howard Pyle | It happened that among those worthies who were summoned unto London Town by the mandate of the Archbishop as above recounted, there was a certain knight, very honorable and of high estate, by name Sir Ector of Bonmaison--surnamed the Trustworthy Knight, because of the fidelity with which he kept the counsel of those who confided in him, and because he always performed unto all men, whether of high or low degree, that which he promised to undertake, without defalcation as to the same. | Buy | |
| The Member of the Wedding | Carson McCullers | It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. | Buy | |
| Oldtown Folks | Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe | It has always been a favorite idea of mine, that there is so much of the human in every man, that the life of any one individual, however obscure, if really and vividly perceived in all its aspirations, struggles, failures, and successes, would command the interest of all others. | Buy | |
| Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories | Garrison Keillor | It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was chilly on Tuesday and Wednesday, as a cold front moved through, and the tomato growers stayed up late debating whether to cover for frost or not. "Naw," they decided about ten o'clock, and hit the hay and lay thinking about it: the humiliation of getting froze out, the shame of eating store-bought tomatoes, or, worse, going on tomato relief. | Buy | |
| The Greene Murder Case | S S Van Dine | It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. | Buy | |
| The Greene Murder Case | S S van Dine | It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H.B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy, for here, surely, is one of the outstanding mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. | Buy | |
| The Green Hat | Michael Arlen | It has occurred to the writer to call this unimportant history The Green Hat because a green hat was the first thing about her that he saw: as also it was, in a way, the last thing about her that he saw. | Buy | |
| Auntie Mame | Patrick Dennis | It has rained all day. Not that I mind rain, but this is the day I promised to put up the screens and take my kid to the beach. I also meant to daub some giddy stencils on the composition walls of the place in the cellar which the realtor called a Rumpus Room and to start finishing what the realtor called an Unfinished Attic, Ideal for Guest Room, Game Room, Studio or Den. | Buy | |
| King Solomon's Mines | H Rider Haggard | It is a curious thing that at my age, fifty-five last birthday, I should find myself taking up a pen to try and write a history. | Buy | |
| Plains Song | Wright Morris | It is a curse in this family that all women bear only daughters, if anything at all. | Buy | |
| The American Claimant | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It is a matchless morning in rural England. | Buy | |
| Anthem | Ayn Rand | It is a sin to write this. | Buy | |
| Joseph Andrews | Henry Fielding | It is a trite but true observation that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts, and if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praiseworthy. | Buy | |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. | Buy | Read |
| Christmas Day in the Workhouse | George R Sims | It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse. | Buy | |
| In the Workhouse--Christmas Day | George Robert Sims | It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse. | Buy | |
| Guy Livingstone | George Alfred Lawrence | 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 | |
| Orley Farm | Anthony Trollope | It is not true that a rose by any other name will smell as sweet. Were it true, I should call this story "The Great Orley Farm Case." But who would ask for the ninth number of a serial work burthened with so very uncouth an appellation? Thence, and therefore,--Orley Farm. | Buy | |
| Quartered Safe Out Here | George MacDonald Fraser | It is satisfying, and at the same time slightly eerie, to read in an official military history of an action in which you took part, even as a very minor and bewildered participant. | Buy | |
| Land of Always-Night | Kenneth Robeson | It is somewhat ridiculous to say that a human hand can resemble a butterfly. | Buy | |
| Kenilworth | Walter Dill Scott | It is the privilege of tale-tellers to open their story in an inn, the free rendezvous of all travellers, and where the humour of each displays itself, without ceremony or restraint. | Buy | |
| Captain Lightfoot | W R Burnett | It is time now, I think, to tell the true story of Michael Martin, better known to the people of Ireland generally - though not to his home town - as Captain Lightfoot. | Buy | |
| Lady Audley's Secret | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted; for there was no thoroughfare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all. | Buy | |
| The Christmas Box | Richard Paul Evans | It may be that I am growing old in this world and have used up more than my share of allotted words and eager audiences. | Buy | |
| The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. | Buy | |
| A Long Line of Dead Men | Lawrence Block | It must have been around nine o'clock when the old man stood up and tapped his spoon against the bowl of his water glass. | Buy | |
| The Quincunx | Charles Palliser | It must have been late autumn of that year, and probably it was towards dusk for the sake of being less conspicuous. | Buy | |
| Evensong | Gail Godwin | It on began on a Friday evening. I mean "began" in the old storytelling sense, for oftener than not what we call beginnings are fulfillments of things set in motion a long time ago. | Buy | |
| A Rage to Live | John O'Hara | It rained lightly on the morning of Wednesday, July 4, 1917, and the Festival Committee met to decide whether to postpone the Festival until the following Saturday. | Buy | |
| This Side of Innocence | Taylor Caldwell | It seemed to Jerome Lindsey that disagreeable news invariably arrived when he and New York weather were in execrable moods. | Buy | |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. | Buy | |
| The Day Before Midnight | Stephen Hunter | It snowed that night, and sometime after three, Beth Hummel awoke, as she always did, to the sound of small bare feet padding urgently across the hard wood of the floor. | Buy | |
| Deliverance | James Dickey | It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. | Buy | |
| The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon | It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shear's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. | Buy | |
| Going After Cacciato | Tim O'Brien | It was a bad time. | Buy | |
| The Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco | It was a beautiful morning at the end of November. During the night it had snowed, but only a little, and the earth was covered with a cool blanket no more than three fingers high. In the darkness, immediately after lauds, we heard Mass in a village in the valley. Then we set off toward the mountain, as the sun first appeared. | Buy | |
| Bomber | Len Deighton | It was a bomber's sky: dry air, wind enough to clear the smoke, cloud broken enough to recognize a few stars. | Buy | |
| 1984 | George Orwell | It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. | Buy | |
| Daughter of Silence | Morris L. West | It was a bright noon, high summer, in the upland valleys of Tuscany: a torpid time, a season of dust and languor, of stripped flax and larks in the wheat stubble, and the new wines coming to vintage in the country of the Elder Gods. | Buy | |
| Jane Cable | George Barr McCutcheon | It was a bright, clear afternoon in the late fall that pretty Miss Cable drove up in her trap and waited at the curb for her father to come forth from his office in one of Chicago's tallest buildings. | Buy | |
| Robert Elsmere | Mrs. Humphry Ward | It was a brilliant afternoon towards the end of May. The spring had been unusually cold and late, and it was evident from the general aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of Long Whindale that warmth and sunshine had only just penetrated to its bare green recesses, where the few scattered trees were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at their feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of March and April still lingered, as though they found it impossible to believe that their rough brother, the east wind, had at last deserted them. | Buy | |
| Irresistible Forces | Danielle Steel | It was a brilliantly sunny day in New York, and the temperature had soared over the hundred mark long before noon. You could have fried an egg on the sidewalk. | Buy | |
| The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg | Louis Bromfield | It was a broiling afternoon of mid-August in Brinoe and everybody who was anybody had long ago quit its burning pavements and chilly palaces for the mountains or the sea. | Buy | |
| The Big Fisherman | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | It was a calm, early summer noon in the southern mountains of Arabia. | Buy | |
| Message from Nam | Danielle Steel | It was a chill gray day in Savannah, and there was a brisk breeze blowing in from the ocean. There were leaves on the ground in Forsyth Park and a few couples were wandering hand in hand, some women were chatting and smoking a last cigarette before they went back to work. And in Savannah High School, the hallways were deserted. The bell had rung at one o'clock, and the students were all in their classrooms. There was laughter coming from one room, and silence from several others. | Buy | |
| Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Monster Movie | David A Adler | It was a cold winter Sunday afternoon. | Buy | |
| A Wrinkle In Time | Madeline L'Engle | It was a dark and stormy night | Buy | |
| Paul Clifford | Edward George Bulwer-Lytton | It was a dark and stormy night and the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. | Buy | |
| Paul Clifford | Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton | It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps the struggled against the darkness. | Buy | |
| Septimius Felton | Nathaniel Hawthorne | It was a day in early spring; and as that sweet, genial time of year and atmosphere calls out tender greenness from the ground,--beautiful flowers, or leaves that look beautiful because so long unseen under the snow and decay,--so the pleasant air and warmth had called out three young people, who sat on a sunny hill-side enjoying the warm day and one another. | Buy | |
| The Last of the Mohicans | James Fenimore Cooper | It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. | Buy | |
| Queed | Henry Sydnor Harrison | It was a five of a November afternoon, crisp and sharp, and already running into dusk. Down the street came a girl and a dog, rather a small girl and quite a behemothian dog. If she had been a shade smaller, or he a shade more behemothian, the thing would have approached a parody on one's settled idea of a girl and a dog. She had enough height to save that, but it was the narrowest sort of squeak. | Buy | |
| The Intimidators | Donald Hamilton | It was a good day, until we got back to the dock and found the messenger waiting. | Buy | |
| Sloop of War | Alexander Kent | It was a little more than a hundred yards' walk from the busy foreshore to the elegant white building at the top of the coast road, but within a minute of leaving the launch Richard Bolitho was damp with sweat. | Buy | |
| The Civil War | Shelby Foote | It was a Monday in Washington, January 21; Jefferson Davis rose from his seat in the Senate. | Buy | |
| The Heart of a Goof | Pelham Grenville Wodehouse | It was a morning when all nature shouted "Fore!" | Buy | |
| Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour | Robert Smith Surtees | It was a murky October day that the hero of our tale, Mr Sponge, or Soapey Sponge, as his good-natured friends call him, was seen mizzling along Oxford Street, wending his way to the west. | Buy | |
| Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | It was a pleasure to burn. | Buy | |
| The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. | Buy | |
| The Man from St. Petersburg | Ken Follett | It was a slow Sunday afternoon, the kind Walden loved. He stood at an open window and looked across the park. The broad, level lawn was doted with mature trees: a Scotch pine, a pair of mighty oaks, several chestnuts and a willow like a head of girlish curls. The sun was high and the trees cast dark, cool shadows. The birds were silent, but a hum of contented bees came from the flowering creeper beside the window. The house as still, too. | Buy | |
| The Ginger Man | J P Donleavy | It was a steep hill up to Balscaddoom | Buy | |
| Under Drake's Flag | G A Henty | It was a stormy morning in the month of May, 1752, and the fishermen of the little village of Westport, situate about five miles from Plymouth, clustered in the public-house of the place, and discussed, not the storm, for that was a common topic, but the fact that Master Francis Drake, whose ships now lay at Plymouth, was visiting the Squire of Treadwood, had passed through the village overnight, and might go through it again to-day. | Buy | |
| The Continental Op | Dashiell Hammett | It was a wandering daughter job. | Buy | |
| The Intruders | Hugh Garner | It was a warm summer Friday evening, the not yet setting sun disappearing behind the stores, restaurants and the few tall houses on the west side of Parliament Street, its light fast rising up the walls of the business block fronting on the street's eastern sidewalk. | Buy | |
| Star Money | Kathleen Winsor | It was a woman's bedroom, actually a boudoir, and no man belonged in it except by invitation. | Buy | |
| City Of Glass | Paul Auster | It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. | Buy | |
| The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. | Buy | |
| The British Museum is Falling Down | David John Lodge | 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 | |
| The British Museum is Falling Down | David Lodge | 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 | |
| The Eustace Diamonds | Anthony Trollope | It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies--who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two--that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. | Buy | |
| The Giver | Lois Lowry | It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. | Buy | |
| Fine Things | Danielle Steel | It was almost impossible to get to Lexington and Sixty-third Street. The wind was howling, and the snow drifts had devoured all but the largest cars. The buses had given up somewhere around Twenty-third Street, where they sat huddled like frozen dinosaurs, as one left the flock only very rarely to venture uptown, lumbering down the paths the snowplows left, to pick up a few brave travelers who would rush from doorways frantically waving their arms, sliding wildly to the curb, hurling themselves over the packed snowbanks, to mount the buses with damp eyes and red faces, and in Bernie's case, icicles on his beard. | Buy | |
| Cocaine and Blue Eyes | Fred Zackel | It was almost midnight Christmas, and the runt was spoiling my breakfast. | Buy | |
| Vandover and the Brute | Frank Norris | It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of his past life. | Buy | |
| The Ravagers | Donald Hamilton | It was an acid job, and they're never pleasant to come upon, even when you're more or less prepared to find something wrong, as I'd been. | Buy | |
| Mr. Popper's Penguins | Richard and Florence Atwater | It was an afternoon in late September. In the pleasant city of Stillwater, Mr. Popper, the house painter, was going home from work. | Buy | |
| The Sacred Fount | Henry James | It was an occasion, I felt - the prospect of a large party - to look out at the station for others, possible friends and even possible enemies, who might be going | Buy | |
| The Years | Virginia Woolf (nee Stephen) (Adeline Virginia Woolf) | It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and purple flying over the land. | Buy | |
| Midnight Plus One | Gavin Lyall | It was April in Paris, so the rain wasn't as cold as it had been a month before. | Buy | |
| Castle Dangerous | Walter Dill Scott | It was at the close of an early spring day, when nature, in a cold province of Scotland, was reviving from her winter's sleep, and the air at least, though not the vegetation, gave promise of an abatement of the rigour of the season, that two travellers, whose appearance at that early period sufficiently announced their wandering character, which, in general, secured a free passage even through a dangerous were seen coming from the south-westward, within a few miles of the Castle of Douglas, and seemed to be holding their course in the direction of the river of that name, whose dale afforded a species of approach to that memorable feudal fortress. | Buy | |
| Joseph and His Brothers | Thomas Mann | It was beyond the hills north of Hebron, a little east of the Jerusalem road, in the month of Adah; a spring evening, so brightly moonlit that one could have seen to read, and the leaves of the single tree there standing, an ancient and mighty terebinth, short-trunked, with strong and spreading branches, stood out find and sharp against the light, beside their clusters of blossom--highly distinct, yet shimmering in a web of moonlight. | Buy | |
| Bright Day | J B Priestly | It was Brent, the film producer, who suggested that I should go down to Tralorna and stay at the Royal Ocean Hotel. | Buy | |
| The Bars of Iron | Ethel May Dell | It was certainly not Caesar's fault. | Buy | |
| The Parasites | Daphne du Maurier | It was Charles who called us the parasites. | Buy | |
| Silent Night | Mary Higgins Clark | It was Christmas Eve in New York City. The cab slowly made its way down Fifth Avenue. It was nearly five o'clock. The traffic was heavy and the sidewalks were jammed with last-minute Christmas shoppers, homebound office workers, and tourists anxious to glimpse the elaborately trimmed store windows and the fabled Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. | Buy | |
| Quo Vadis | Henryk Sienkiewicz | It was close to noon before Petronius came awake, feeling as drained and listless and detached as always. He was a guest at one of Nero's banquets the evening before and the orgy dragged on late into the night, and his health hadn't been all that good anyway for some time. He told himself that waking in the morning was a kind of mental and physical paralysis where neither his mind nor his body was capable of action. | Buy | |
| The Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth | It was cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. | Buy | |
| The Clown | Heinrich Boll | It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newsstand, buy the evening papers, go outside, and signal for a taxi. | Buy | |
| The Clown | Heinrich Böll | It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newstand, buy the evening newspaper, go outside and signal for a taxi. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Waterloo | Bernard Cornwell | It was dawn on the northern frontier of France; a border marked only by a shallow stream which ran between the stunted trunks of pollarded willows. | Buy | |
| The Last Hurrah | Edwin O'Connor | It was early in August when Frank Skeffington decided--or rather, announced his decision, which actually had been arrived at some months before--to run for re-election as mayor of the city. | Buy | |
| The Black Cloud | Fred Hoyle | It was eight o'clock along the Greenwich meridian. In England the wintry sun of 7th January, 1964, was just rising. Throughout the length and breadth of the land people were shivering in ill-heated houses as they read the morning papers, ate their breakfasts, and grumbled about the weather, which, truth to tell, had been appalling of late. | Buy | |
| Death In Holy Orders | P D James | It was Father Martin's idea that I should write an account of how I found the body. | Buy | |
| Lady Yesterday | Loren D Estleman | It was February by the time I caught up with Clara Rainey, at the end of a trail that wound to Miami and back north to a steakhouse called Astaire's in Quakertown south of Bloomfield. | Buy | |
| Dreams Die First | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | It was five o'clock in the afternoon when I woke up. The room stank of stale cigarettes and cheap sour red wine. I rolled out of bed and almost fell as I stumbled over the boy sleeping on the floor beside my bed. I stared down at him in surprise. He was naked and I couldn't remember how or when he got there. Even worse, I didn't recognize him. | Buy | |
| The Jungle | Upton Beall Sinclair | It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Tiger | Bernard Cornwell | It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England. | Buy | |
| Never Victorious, Never Defeated | Taylor Caldwell | It was generally agreed, and with indignation by a few, that it had been a great scandal. | Buy | |
| A Matter of Honor | Eugene Izzi | It was getting late, and Marshall Del Greco was comfortably aware that he was about half-drunk. | Buy | |
| The Black Rose | Thomas B Costain | It was growing late, and still there was no sign of Engaine. Could Niniam have been mistaken? | Buy | |
| Soundings | Arthur Hamilton Gibbs | It was half-past five in the morning. The village was stretching itself. Thin spirals of blue smoke began to creep out of the first chimney, then another. From inside cow byres came the subdued rattle of chains and the swish of cows being milked. One by one the animals came out into the dewy paddocks with that peculiar low mumble as though grumbling to themselves. | Buy | |
| The Mysterious Stranger | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It was in 1590--winter. Austria was far away from the world, and asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Belief in Austria. But they meant it as a compliment, not a slur, and it was so taken, and we were all proud of it. I remember it well, although I was only a boy; and I remember, too, the pleasure it gave me. | Buy | |
| Guy Mannering | Walter Dill Scott | It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17--, when a young English gentleman, who had just left the university of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, to visit some parts of the north of England; and curiosity extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister country. | Buy | |
| St. Ives | Robert Louis Stevenson | It was in the month of May, 1813, that I was so unlucky as to fall into the hands of the enemy. | Buy | |
| Masterman Ready | Captain Maryatt | It was in the month of October, 18--, that the Pacific, a large ship, was running before a heavy gale of wind in the middle of the vast Atlantic ocean. | Buy | |
| Masterman Ready | Captain Maryatt | It was in the month of October, 18--, that the Pacific, a large ship, was running before a heavy gale of wind in the middle of the vast Atlantic ocean. | Buy | |
| The Settlers in Canada | Captain Maryatt | It was in the year 1794, that an English family went out to settle in Canada. | Buy | |
| The Tontine | Thomas B Costain | It was in the year 1815 and the people of England were suffering from strange and unpredictable hours. The war against the French had been going on too long. | Buy | |
| The Perils of Certain English Prisoners | Charles Dickens | It was in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and forty-four, that I, Gill Davis to command, His Mark, having then the honour to be a private in the Royal Marines, stood a-leaning over the bulwarks of the armed sloop Christopher Columbus, in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore. | Buy | |
| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company--for he did all the talking. | Buy | |
| A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court | Mark Twain | It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about | Buy | |
| Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Armour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide. | Buy | |
| The Group | Mary McCarthy | It was June, 1933, one week after Commencement, when Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27, in the chapel of St. George's Church, P.E., Karl F. Reiland, Rector. | Buy | |
| The Billion Dollar Sure Thing | Paul E. Erdman | It was just after seven in the evening of Monday, October 27. The fall weather had been fantastic all over Europe that year, and was still holding. The trees in the small park adjacent to the cathedral had not yet lost all of their leaves. But the brown leaves that remained rustled in the light breeze coming over the Rhine from the hills of the Black Forest, darkly brooding on the horizon. | Buy | |
| Intruder in the Dust | William Faulkner | It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beuachamp though the whole town (the whole country for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. | Buy | |
| The Lion of the North | G A Henty | It was late in the afternoon in the spring of the year 1630; the hilltops of the south of Scotland were covered with masses of cloud, and a fierce wind swept the driving rain before it with such force that it was not easy to make way against it. | Buy | |
| The Castle | Franz Kafka | It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill has hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him. | Buy | |
| Galatia 2.2 | Richard Powers | It was like so, but wasn't. | Buy | |
| The Two Vanrevels | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | It was long ago in the days when men sighed when they fell in love; when people danced by candle and lamp, and did dance, too, instead of solemnly gliding about; in that mellow time so long ago, when the young were romantic and summer was roses and wine, old Carewe brought his lovely daughter home from the convent to wreck the hearts of the youth of Rouen. | Buy | |
| Catch 22 | Joseph Heller | It was love at first sight. | Buy | |
| Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. | Buy | |
| Mrs. Miniver | Jan Struther | It was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding goodbye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it. | Buy | |
| Annabel Lee | Edgar Allan Poe | It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;-- And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. | Buy | |
| The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | It was many years ago. | Buy | |
| Ovington's Bank | Stanley J Weyman | It was market day in Aldersbury, the old county town of Aldshire, and the busiest hour of the day. | Buy | |
| The Mark | Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins | It was midafternoon in New Babylon, and David Hassid was frantic. Annie was nowhere in sight and he had heard nothing from her, yet he could barely turn his eyes from the gigantic screens in the palace courtyard. | Buy | |
| Jonathon Livingston Seagull | Richard Bach | It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea. | Buy | |
| Sackett’s Land | Louis L'Amour | 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 Spy | James Fenimore Cooper | It was near the close of the year 1780 that a solitary traveler
was seen pursuing his way through one of the numerous little
valleys of Westchester.* [*As each state of the American Union has its own counties, it often happens that there are several which bear the same name. The scene of this tale is in New York, whose county of Westchester is the nearest adjoining to the city.] | Buy | |
| Murder in the Evening | Jonathan Latimer | It was nearly evening. | Buy | |
| Blood-Red Dream | Michael Collins | It was night outside now in the April drizzle. | Buy | |
| Mamba's Daughters | DuBose Heyward | It was no mere chance that, during the first decade of the new century, brought Mamba out of the darkness of the underworld into the light of the Wentworths' kitchen. | Buy | |
| White-Jacket | Herman Melville | It was not a very white jacket, but white enough, in all conscience, as the sequel will show. | Buy | |
| The Snow Tiger | Desmond Bagley | It was not a big avalanche, but then, it did not need to be very big to kill a man, and it was only because of Mike McGill's insistence on the Oertel cord that Ballard survived. | Buy | |
| The Fan Club | Irving Wallace | It was not long after daybreak this early June morning--ten minutes after seven o'clock, according to his wristwatch--and the sun was continuing to rise, slowly warming the vast sprawl of buildings and the long stretch of Southern California country. | Buy | |
| Rose o' the River | Kate Douglas Wiggin | It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet. | Buy | |
| The Hand in Glove | Rex Stout | It was not surprising that Sylvia Raffray, on that Saturday in September, had occasion for discourse with various men, none of them utterly ordinary, and with one remarkable young woman; it was not surprising that all this happened without any special effort on Sylvia's part, for she was rich, personable to an extreme, an orphan, and six months short of twenty-one years. | Buy | |
| The Indian in the Cupboard | Lynne Reid Banks | It was not that Omri didn't appreciate Patrick's birthday present to him. | Buy | |
| Malice Aforethought | Frances Iles | It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. | Buy | |
| Point of Impact | Stephen Hunter | It was November, cold and wet in west Arkansas, a miserable dawn following on a miserable night. | Buy | |
| The Kingdom Round the Corner | Coningsby William Dawson | It was on a blustering March morning in 1919 that Tabs regained his freedom. His last five months had been spent among doctors, having sundry bullets extracted from his legs. | Buy | |
| Dawn | Eleanor Hodgman Porter | It was on his fourteenth birthday that Keith Burton discovered the Great Terror, though he did not know it by that name until some days afterward. He knew only, to this surprise and distress, that the "Treasure Island," given to him by his father for a birthday present, was printed in type so blurred and poor that he could scarcely read it. | Buy | |
| Fire in the Steppe | Henryk Sienkiewicz | It was on one of those glowing Autumn afternoons that Pan Andrei Kmita sat sipping his after-dinner mead in the cool shade of a summerhouse, gazing fondly through the crisscross bars of the leafy arbor at his wife who strolled long the clean-swept orchard avenue before him. | Buy | |
| The View From Pompey's Head | Hamilton Basso | It was one of the grievances of the business element of Pompey's Head that the all-pullman train from New York to Miami reached its community at five forty-six in the morning. | Buy | |
| Farewell, My Lovely | Raymond Chandler | It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. | Buy | |
| Mary Poppins Comes Back | P L Travers | It was one of those morning when everything looks very neat and bright and shiny, as though the world had been tidied up overnight. | Buy | |
| Accident | Danielle Steel | It was one of those perfect, deliciously warm Saturday afternoons in April, when the air on your cheek feels like silk, and you want to stay outdoors forever. | Buy | |
| Cassidy's Girl | David Goodis | It was raining hard in Philadelphia as Cassidy worked the bus through heavy traffic on Market Street. | Buy | |
| The Jungle Book | Rudyard Kipling | It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. | Buy | |
| Wanted! | Frank Gruber | It was seventy-two miles to Fort Scott and the doctor intended to make the trip in one day. | Buy | |
| The Glitter Dome | Joseph Wambaugh | It was six inches long. He stroked it lightly, but he could not conjure an appropriate response: eroticism, revulsion, fascination, terror. | Buy | |
| Two Make a World | Peter B Kyne | It was six o'clock P.M. of an afternoon in midsummer, and Mr. Tobias Hand still sat in the little office allocated to him by Worden, Garr, Ltd.--in order that, freed from the turmoil of the general office, he might write the bright, snappy human-interest advertising copy for which he was paid twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, and which, for the past six months, he was aware he had not been earning. | Buy | |
| Ice | Ed McBain | It was still snowing hard when she came out of the theatre. | Buy | |
| McTeague | Frank Norris | It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. | Buy | |
| Nautilus 90 North | Commander William R Anderson | It was Sunday, June 8, 1958. Our ship, the nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus, lay quietly moored at Pier 91 in Seattle, Washington. | Buy | |
| The Manchurian Candidate | Richard Condon | It was sunny in San Francisco; a fabulous condition. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Siege | Bernard Cornwell | It was ten days short of Candlemas, 1814, and an Atlantic wind carried shivers of cold rain that slapped on narrow cobbled alleys, spilt from the broken gutters of tangled roofs, and pitted the water of St Jean de Luz's inner harbour. | Buy | |
| The Adventurers | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | It was ten years after the violence in which he died. And his time on this earth was over. | Buy | |
| Amy and Isabelle | Elizabeth Strout | It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead. Just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town, dirty yellow foam collecting at its edge. Strangers driving by on the turnpike rolled up their windows at the gagging, sulfurous smell and wondered how anyone could live with that kind of stench coming from the river and the mill. | Buy | |
| Earthly Powers | Anthony Burgess | It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. | Buy | |
| The Little Drummer Girl | John Le Carre | It was the Bad Godesberg incident that gave the proof, though the German authorities had no earthly means of knowing this. | Buy | |
| The Queen's Necklace | Alexandre Dumas pere | It was the beginning of April, 1784, between twelve and one o'clock. | Buy | |
| A Tail of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. | Buy | |
| Eye of the Needle | Ken Follett | It was the coldest winter for forty-five years. Villages in the English countryside were cut off by the snow and the Thames froze over. One day in January the Glasgow-London train arrived at Euston twenty-four hours late. | Buy | |
| Full Dress Gray | Lucian Truscott | It was the day after Labor Day, and it was hot. | Buy | |
| The Crow Road | Ian M Banks | It was the day my grandmother exploded. | Buy | |
| Ape and Essence | Aldous Huxley | It was the day of Gandhi's assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the center of the universe is here, not there. | Buy | |
| The Carfitt Crisis | J B Priestly | It was the dull leaden middle of a Friday afternoon in November. | Buy | |
| The Pirate | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | It was the eighth day of the storm. There had never been a storm like this one before. Not even in the memory of old Mustapha, the camel keeper, who himself an old man when all the others in the caravan were boys. | Buy | |
| The Image Men | J B Priestly | It was the end of a wet Monday afternoon in autumn. | Buy | |
| The Image Men | John Boynton Priestley | It was the end of a wet Monday afternoon in autumn. | Buy | |
| Tante | Anne Douglas Sedgwick | It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the endearing ugliness. | Buy | |
| A White Bird Flying | Bess Streeter Aldrich | It was the first Tuesday in August. The Nebraska heat rolled in upon one like the engulfing waves of a dry sea,--a thick material substance against which one seemed to push when moving about. | Buy | |
| The Rains Came | Louis Bromfield | It was the hour of the day that Ransome loved best and he sat on the verandah now, drinking brandy and watching the golden light flood all the banyan trees and the yellow-gray house and the scarlet creeper for one brilliant moment before the sun, with a sudden plunge, dropped below the horizon and left the whole countryside in darkness. | Buy | |
| You Can't Go Home Again | Thomas Wolfe | It was the hour of twilight on a soft spring day toward the end of April in the year of Our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window and looked out at what he could see of New York. | Buy | |
| Fair Weather | Richard Peck | It was the last day of our old lives, and we didn't even know it. I didn't. It looked like any old day to me, a sultry summer morning hot enough to ruffle the roofline. But then, any little thing could come as a surprise to us. We were just plain country people. I suppose we were poor, but we didn't know it. | Buy | |
| Omoo | Herman Melville | It was the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our escape from the bay. | Buy | |
| Clochemerle | Gabriel Chevalier | It was the month of October 1922, at about five o'clock in the afternoon. The principal square of ______ was shady with its great chestnuts, in the centre of which stood a magnificent lime-tree said to have been planted in 1518 to celebrate the arrival of Anne de Beaujeu in those parts. | Buy | |
| Night Over Water | Ken Follett | It was the most romantic plane ever made. | Buy | |
| Dakota Home | Debbie Macomber | It was the screaming that woke him | Buy | |
| Drums Along the Mohawk | Walter D. Edmonds | It was the second day of their journey to their first home. | Buy | |
| The Covenant | James A. Michener | It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa. | Buy | |
| Mr. Britling Sees It Through | H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) | It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck's first visit to England, and he was at his acutest perception of differences. He found England in every way gratifying and satisfactory, and more of a contrast with things American than he had ever dared to hope. | Buy | |
| Mr. Britling Sees It Through | H G Wells | It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck's first visit to England, and he was at his acutest perception of differences. | Buy | |
| Never Street | Loren D Estleman | It was the summer of darkness. | Buy | |
| Icon | Frederick Forsyth | It was the summer when the price of a small loaf of bread topped a million roubles | Buy | |
| Pretend You Don't See Her | Mary Higgins Clark | It was the week after Labor Day, and from the steady ringing of the phones in the offices of Parker and Parker, it was clear to Lacey that the summer doldrums finally were over. | Buy | |
| The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Victor Hugo | It was three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the University, and the Town. | Buy | |
| Prince of Foxes | Samuel Shellabarger | It was to be a lute this time, a lute fit for an angel. Perfect. Incomparable. | Buy | |
| Faraway | J B Priestly | It was Tuesday evening and so William's friend, Greenlaw, from the Buntingham Grammar School, was there. | Buy | |
| Disputed Passage | Lloyd Cassell Douglas | It was two o'clock in the afternoon of the last Thursday in September, opening day of the fall semester. | Buy | |
| Colours Aloft! | Alexander Kent | It was unusually cold for mid-September and the cobbled streets of Portsmouth Point shone like metal from the overnight rain. | Buy | |
| The Good Earth | Pearl Buck | It was Wang Lung's marriage day. | Buy | |
| The Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck | It was Wang Lung's marriage day. | Buy | |
| Half a Rogue | Harold MacGrath | It was Warrington's invariable habit--when no business or social engagement pressed him to go elsewhere--to drop into a certain quaint little restaurant just off Broadway for his dinners. It was out of the way; the throb and rattle of the great commercial artery became like the far-off murmur of the sea, restful rather than annoying. He always made it a point to dine alone, undisturbed. The proprietor nor his silent-footed waiters had the slightest idea who Warrington was. | Buy | |
| The Eyes of the World | Harold Bell Wright | It was winter--cold and snow and ice and naked trees and leaden clouds and stinging wind. | Buy | |
| Absolute Beginners | Colin MacInnes | It was with the advent of the Laudie London era that I realized the whole teenage epic was tottering to doom. | Buy | |
| And Now Tomorrow | Rachel Field | It was years since I had set foot in the ell storeroom. But yesterday Aunt Em sent me there on an errand, and the souvenirs I came upon have disturbed me ever since, teasing my mind with memories that persist like fragments of old tunes. | Buy | |
| Outlander | Diana Jean Gabaldon | It wasn't a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance. Mrs. Baird's was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast establishments in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper, gleaming floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory. Mrs. Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection to Frank lining her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens of books and papers with which he always traveled. | Buy | |
| Outlander | Edward S Aarons | It wasn't a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first sight. | Buy | |
| The Exhibitionist | Henry Sutton | It wasn't any lack of human feeling. There were people in the town who said it was that, but it wasn't. | Buy | |
| The Solarians | Norman Spinrad | It would be another uneven battle. | Buy | |
| The Aerodrome | Rex Ernest Warner | It would be difficult to overestimate the importance to me of the events which had taken place previous to the hour (it was shortly after ten o'clock in the morning) when I was lying in the marsh near the small pond at the bottom of Gurney's meadow, my face in the mud and the black mud beginning to ooze through the spaces between the fingers of my outstretched hands, drunk, but not blindly so, for I seemed only to have lost the use of my limbs. | Buy | |
| Everybody Had a Gun | Richard S Prather | It's a funny thing. | Buy | |
| Smilla's Sense of Snow | Peter Høeg | It's freezing - an extraordinary 0º fahrenheit - and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine the snow is qanik - big almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost. | Buy | |
| All My Goodbyes | Jacqueline Burt Henkel | It's important that I put into words the thoughts and feelings that were left unsaid while my parents were still alive. | Buy | |
| The Beach House | James Patterson and Peter de Jonge | It's like dancing sitting down. Squeeze--tap--release--twist. Left hand--right foot--left hand--right hand. | Buy | |
| Prey | Michael Crichton | It's midnight now. The house is dark. I am not sure how this will turn out. | Buy | |
| Everything's Eventual | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | It's so dark that for awhile--just how long I don't know--I think I'm still unconscious. | Buy | |
| The Disenchanted | Budd Wilson Schulberg | It's the waiting, Shep was thinking. You wait to get inside the gate, you wait outside the great man's office, you wait for your agent to make the deal, you wait for the assignment, you wait for instructions on how to write what they want you to write, and then, when you finish your treatment and turn it in, you wait for that unique contribution to art, the story conference. | Buy |