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| Books in database: 3191 | ||||||||
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| The Life of King Henry the Fifth | William Shakespeare | O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention; A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! | Buy | |
| The Long Afternoon of Earth | Brian W Aldiss | Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, spreading riotous and strange in their instinct for growth. | Buy | |
| Diary of a Madman | Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol | October 3rd Something very peculiar happened today. | Buy | |
| In the Midst of Death | Lawrence Block | October is about as good as the city gets. | Buy | |
| The Bishop Murder Case | S S Van Dine | Of all the criminal cases in which Philo Vance participated as unofficial investigator, the most sinister, the most bizarre, the seemingly most incomprehensible, and certainly the most terrifying was the one that followed the famous Greene murders. | Buy | |
| Eben Holden | Irving Bacheller | Of all the people that ever went west that expedition was the most remarkable. | Buy | |
| Middle Passage | Charles Richard Johnson | Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. | Buy | |
| The Small House at Allington | Anthony Trollope | Of course there was a Great House at Allington. How otherwise should there have been a Small House? | Buy | |
| Shirley | Charlotte Brontë | Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good. | Buy | |
| Paradise Lost | John Milton | Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden. | Buy | |
| The Datchley Inheritance | Stephen McKenna | Of the fifty readers who learned last spring that John Datchley, of Datchley Castle, was dead, hardly five can have realized that one of the strangest chapters in the history of succession was opening under their eyes. | Buy | |
| Fuzz | Ed McBain | Oh boy, what a week. | Buy | |
| 1919 | John Dos Passos | Oh the infantree the infantree With the dirt behind their ears ARMIES CLASH AT VERDUN IN GLOBE'S GREATEST BATTLE 150,000 MEN AND WOMEN PARADE but another question and a very important one is raised. | Buy | |
| Desperation | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | Oh! Oh, Jesus! Gross! "What, Mary, what?" "Didn't you see it?" "See what?" | Buy | |
| La belle dame sane merci | John Keats (1) | Oh, what can all thee knight at arms Alone and palely loitering? | Buy | |
| Prince of the Palais Royle | Max Pemberton | Oh, yes, I remember her perfectly ... in the year 1862 ... the woman Lola Ferez, of whom all Paris had begun to talk. | Buy | |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | Okonwko was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. | Buy | |
| Yarrow | Charles de Lint | Old ghosts lived behind Cat Midhir's eyes, memories that had no home until they came to haunt her. | Buy | |
| The Tragedy of King Richard the Second | William Shakespeare | Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, Brought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son, Here to make good the boist'rous late appeal, Which then our leisure would not le us hear, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray? | Buy | |
| Smoke | Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | On 10th August 1862, at four o'clock in the afternoon a number of people were crowding in front of the famous Conversation at Baden-Baden. | Buy | |
| Journey to the Centre of the Earth | Jules Verne | On 24 May 1863, a Sunday, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, came rushing back towards his little house at No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the historic part of Hamburg. | Buy | |
| Space | James A. Michener | On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years. | Buy | |
| Festival at Farbridge | J B Priestly | On a bleak and gusty Saturday afternoon in March, the 2.45 bus from Market Square, Farbridge, arrived at the corner of Mayton Park Avenue, and stopped just long enough to allow a young woman carrying a portable typewriter to descend, which she did gracefully but grumpily. | Buy | |
| Caravans | James A. Michener | On a bleak wintry morning some years ago I was summoned to the office of our naval attache at the American embassy in Kabul. | Buy | |
| The American | Henry James Jr | On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carre, in the Museum of the Louvre. | Buy | |
| The Black Arrow | Robert Louis Stevenson | On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. | Buy | |
| The Black Arrow | Robert Louis Stevenson | On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. | Buy | |
| The Ruby in the Smoke | Philip Pullman | On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver. | Buy | |
| Shannon's Way | Archibald Joseph Cronin | On a damp evening in December, the fifth of that month, in the year 1919--a date which marked the beginning of a great change in my life--six o'clock had struck from the University tower and the soft mist from the Eldon River was creeping round the Experimental Pathology buildings at the foot of Fenner Hill, invading our long work-room that smelled faintly of formalin, and was lit only by low, green-shaded lamps. | Buy | |
| Pitcairn's Island | Charles Nordhoff and James Hall | On a day late in December, in the year of 1789, while the earth turned steadily on its course, a moment came when the sunlight illuminated San Roque, easternmost cape of the three Americas. Moving swiftly westward, a thousand miles each hour, the light swept over the jungle of the Amazons, and glittered along the icy summits of the Andes. Presently the level rays brought day to the Peruvian coast and moved on, across a vast stretch of lonely sea. | Buy | |
| Doctor Dogbody's Leg | James Norman Hall | On a dreary autumn evening when the clouds hung low in the heavens and the masts and yards of the tall men-of-war in the harbour were obscured by a chill drizzle of rain, there was no more inviting spot in Portsmouth than the taproom of Will Tunn's Cheerful Tortoise. | Buy | |
| Private Eyeful | Henry Kane | On a dusty day in New York--hot afternoon in the springtime--Miss Marla Trent and Mr. William Winkle were seated in desultory tete-a-tete in the major office (Marla's) of MARLA TRENT ENTERPRISES. | Buy | |
| The Spectator Bird | Wallace Stegner | On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the cliches about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years. | Buy | |
| The Gown of Glory | Agnes Sligh Turnbull | On a gusty March afternoon in the year eighteen and eighty-one, a battered black hack drawn by two gray horses appeared on the top of Haldeman's Hill, swayed for a moment as the wind from the high ground struck it, and then lurched forward in the hub-deep mud almost upon the horses' haunches as the down grade sharply began. | Buy | |
| Main Street | Sinclair Lewis | On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. | Buy | |
| The Age of Innocence | Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones) | On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. | Buy | |
| The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York | Buy | |
| Even the Wicked | Lawrence Block | On a Tuesday night in August I was sitting in the living room with TJ, watching two guys hit each other on one of the Spanish-language cable channels, and enjoying the fresh air more than the fight. | Buy | |
| Bag of Bones | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription--this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. | Buy | |
| Bag of Bones | Stephen King | On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription--this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. | Buy | |
| A Prince of the Captivity | John Buchan | On a warm June evening three men were sitting in the smoking-room of a London club. | Buy | |
| Windswept | Mary Ellen Chase | On an afternoon in September in the year 1938 two women were driving through the open country of southwest Germany. | Buy | |
| The Fountain | Charles Morgan | On an afternoon of January 1915, a small train dragged itself across the flat Dutch countryside in the neighbourhood of Bodegraven, carrying a group of English officers under guard. | Buy | |
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune. | Buy | |
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. | Buy | |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came
out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked
slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. | Buy | |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky | On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. | Buy | |
| Stormy Weather | Carl Hiaasen | On August 23, the day before the hurricane struck, Max and Bonnie Lamb awoke early, made love twice and rode the shuttle bus to Disney World. | Buy | |
| Mile High | Richard Condon | On December 22, 1958, only two days before, they had been safe in London. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Enemy | Bernard Cornwell | On December 8th, 1812, the English soldiers first came to Adrados. | Buy | |
| The Thorn Birds | Colleen McCullough | On December 8th, 1915, Meggie Cleary had her fourth birthday. After the breakfast dishes were put away her mother silently thrust a brown paper parcel into her arms and ordered her outside. | Buy | |
| The Thorn Birds | Colleen McCollough | On December 8th, 1915, Meggie Cleary had her fourth birthday. | Buy | |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | On February 24, 1815, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding the Chateau d'If, got on board the vessel between Cape Morgion and the Isle of Rion. | Buy | |
| The Island of Doctor Moreau | H G Wells | On February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1' S. and longitude 107' W. | Buy | |
| The Murder Room | P D James | On Friday 25 October, exactly one week before the first body was discovered at the Dupayne Museum, Adam Dalgleish visited the museum for the first time. | Buy | |
| The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Niven Wilder | On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. | Buy | |
| The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder | On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. | Buy | |
| The Adventure of the Speckled Band | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic. | Buy | |
| The Cross On the Drum | Hugh B Cave | On maps of the Caribbean the north coast of the island of St. Joseph has no name or number. | Buy | |
| Tales of the Night | Peter Høeg | On March 18, 1929, a young Dane, David Rehn, was in attendance when the railway line from Cabinda, near the mouth of the Congo, to Katanga in Central Africa was dedicated to integrity. | Buy | |
| The Once and Future King | Terence Hanbury White | On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled she would take it out of the Wart by rapping his knuckles. | Buy | |
| Ridley Walker | Russell Hoban | On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. | Buy | |
| No Ordinary Time | Doris Kearns Goodwin | On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill, he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of the shrunken legs inert beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United States would fall asleep. | Buy | |
| The Last Don | Mario Puzo | On Palm Sunday, one year after the Great War against the Santadio, Don Domenico Clercuzio celebrated the christening of two infants of his own blood and made the most important decision of his life. He invited the greatest Family chiefs in America, as well as Alfred Gronefelt, the owner of the Xanadu Hotel in Vegas, and David Redfellow, who had built up a vast drug empire in the United States. All his partners to some degree. | Buy | |
| The Talisman | Stephen King and Peter Straub | On September 5th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and land come together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic. He was twelve years old and tall for his age. The sea-breeze swept back his brown hair, probably too long, from a fine, clear brow. He stood there, filled with the confused and painful emotions he had lived with for the last three months--since the time when his mother had closed their house on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and, in a flurry of furniture, checks, and real-estate agents, rented an apartment on Central Park West. | Buy | |
| The Victim | Saul Bellow | On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. | Buy | |
| The Lockwood Concern | John O'Hara | On Sunday afternoons people would drive out to have a look at George Lockwood's wall, and sometimes they would see, from a distance, George Lockwood doing the same thing they were doing. | Buy | |
| Christy | Catherine Marshall (Sarah Catherine Wood Marshall) | On that November afternoon when I first saw Cutter Gap, the crumbling chimney of Alice Henderson's cabin stood stark against the sky, blackened by the flames that had consumed the house. The encroaching field grass and chickweed and pennyroyal had all but obliterated even the outline of the foundations. | Buy | |
| The Tower Of London | William Harrison Ainsworth | On the 10th of July 1553, about two hours after noon, a loud discharge of ordnance burst from the turrets of Durham House, then the residence of the Duke of Northumberland, grandmaster of the realm, and occupying the site of the modern range of buildings known as the Adelphi; and at the signal, which was immediately answered from every point along the river where a bombard or culverin could be planted-- . . . | Buy | |
| The Charterhouse of Parma | de Stendhal | On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. | Buy | |
| The Black Tulip | Alexandre Dumas pere | On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are reflected,--the city of the Hague, the capital of the Seven Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, on the charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of Holland was confined. | Buy | |
| The Conspirators | Alexandre Dumas pere | On the 22d of March, in the year of our Lord 1718, a young cavalier of high bearing, about twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age, mounted on a pure-bred Spanish charger, was waiting, towards eight o'clock in the morning, at that end of the Pont Neuf which abuts on the Quai de l'Ecole. | Buy | |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas pere | On the 24th of February, 1810, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la
Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna,
Trieste, and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding the Chateau d'If, got on board the vessel between Cape Morgion and Rion island. Immediately, and according to custom, the ramparts of Fort Saint-Jean were covered with spectators; it is always an event at Marseilles for a ship to come into port, especially when this ship, like the Pharaon, has been built, rigged, and laden at the old Phocee docks, and belongs to an owner of the city. | Buy | |
| The Forty-Five Guardsmen | Alexandre Dumas pere | On the 26th of October, in the year 1585, the barriers of the gate of Saint Antoine were still closed, contrary to the usual custom, at half-past ten in the morning. | Buy | |
| I Know This Much Is True | Wally Lamb | On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. | Buy | |
| Full Circle | Danielle Steel | On the afternoon of Thursday, December 11, 1941, the country was still in a daze. The casualty list was complete, the names of those killed had already been released, and slowly, slowly, in the past few days, the monster of vengeance was raising its head. In almost every American breast pounded a pulse that had been unknown before. It had finally hit us at home, and it wasn't simply a matter of Congress declaring war. There was much more to it than that, much, much more. | Buy | |
| A Window in Thrums | Sir James Matthew Barrie | On the bump of green round which the brae twists, at the top of the brae, and within cry of T'nowhead Farm, still stands a one-storey house, whose whitewashed walls, streaked with the discoloration that rain leaves, look yellow then the snow comes. | Buy | |
| Chronicle of a Death Foretold | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream. | Buy | |
| This Side of Brightness | Colum McCann | On the evening before the first snow fell, he saw a large bird frozen in the waters of the Hudson River. | Buy | |
| Captain from Castile | Samuel Shellabarger | On the evening of June 28th, 1518, young Pedro de Vargas, aged nineteen, confessed his sins of the month to Father Juan Méndez. | Buy | |
| Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp | James Grant | On the evening of the last day of June, 1806, the transports which had brought our troops from Sicily anchored off the Italian coast, in the Bay of St. Eufemio, a little to the southward of a town of that name. | Buy | |
| The Laughing Policeman | Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlö | On the evening of the thirteenth of November it was pouring in Stockholm. | Buy | |
| Horton Hears a Who! | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | On the fifteenth of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, He was splashing . . . enjoying the jungle's great joys . . . When Horton the elephant heard a small noise. | Buy | |
| The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas pere | On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it. Many citizens, seeing the women flying toward the High Street, leaving their children crying at the open doors, hastened to don the cuirass, and supporting their somewhat uncertain courage with a musket or a partisan, directed their steps toward the hostelry of the Jolly Miller, before which was gathered, increasing every minute, a compact group, vociferous and full of curiosity. | Buy | |
| The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the small town of Meung, the birthplace of the author of the 'Romance of the Rose,' appeared to be in a state of revolution, as complete as if the Huguenots were come to make a second siege of La Rochelle. Many of the townsmen, observing the flight along the high street, of women who left their children to squall at the doorsteps, hastened to don their armour, and, fortifying their courage, which was inclined to fail, with a musket or a partisan, proceeded towards the inn of the Jolly Miller, to which a vast and accumulating mob was hastening with intense curiosity.. | Buy | |
| It's an Old Country | J B Priestly | On the Friday of the week following his mother's funeral, Tom Adamson had dinner with the Wentworths, Andrew and Madge. | Buy | |
| The Headless Horseman | Capt. Mayne Reid (Thomas Mayne Reid) | On the great plain of Texas, about a hundred miles southward from the old Spanish town of San Antonio de Bejar, the noonday sun is shedding his beams from a sky of cerulean brightness. Under the golden light appears a group of objects, but little in unison with the landscape around them: since they betoken the presence of human beings, in a spot where there is no sign of human habitation. | Buy | |
| The Deerslayer | James Fenimore Cooper | On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. | Buy | |
| Dinosaur Summer | Greg Bear | On the last day of school, after walking to the old brownstone building on 85th where they had an apartment, Peter's father told him that they would be going away for a few months. | Buy | |
| The Butter Battle Book | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall . . . . . . my grandfather took me out to the Wall. | Buy | |
| Cause of Death | Patricia Cornwell | On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea. | Buy | |
| A Walk Among the Tombstones | Lawrence Block | On the last Thursday in March, somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven in the morning, Francine Khoury told her husband she was going out for a while, she had marketing to do. | Buy | |
| The Devil Knows You're Dead | Lawrence Block | On the last Thursday in September, Lisa Holtzmann went shopping on Ninth Avenue. | Buy | |
| The Bridges of Madison County | Robert Waller | On the morning of August 8, 1965, Robert Kincaid locked the door to his small two-room apartment on the third floor of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington. | Buy | |
| Random Harvest | James Hilton | On the morning of the eleventh of November, 1937, precisely at eleven o'clock, some well-meaning busy-body consulted his watch and loudly announced the hour, with the result that all of us in the dining car felt constrained to put aside drinks and newspapers and spend the two minutes' silence in rather embarrassed stares at one another or out of the window. | Buy | |
| A Tan and Sandy Silence | John D MacDonald | On the most beautiful day any April could be asked to come up with, I was kneeling in eight inches of oily water in the cramped bilge of Meyer's squatty little cabin cruiser, the John Maynard Keynes, taking his automatic bilge pump apart for the third time in an hour. | Buy | |
| Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. | Buy | |
| Me and My Little Brain | John D Fitzgerald | On the second Monday of September in 1897 I was sitting on top of the world. | Buy | |
| Ramage's Signal | Dudley Pope | On the starboard beam the shoreline just three miles away was a gleaming band of sand shimmering in the heat. | Buy | |
| Hungry Hill | Daphne du Maurier | On the third of March 1820, John Brodrick set out from Andriff to Doonhaven, intending to cover the fifteen miles of his journey before nightfall. | Buy | |
| Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak | On they went, singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing. Passers-by made way for the procession, counted the wreaths and crossed themselves. Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried?' | Buy | |
| The Long Roll | Mary Johnston | On this wintry day, cold and sunny, the small town breathed hard in its excitement. It might have climbed rapidly from a lower land, so heightened now were its pulses, so light and rare the air it drank, so raised its mood, so wide, so very wide the opening prospect. Old red-brick houses, old box-planted gardens, old high, leafless trees, out it looked from its place between the mountain ranges. Its point of view, its position in space, had each its value--whether a lesser value or a greater value than other points and positions only the Judge of all can determine. The little town tried to see clearly and to act rightly. If, in this time so troubled, so obscured by mounting clouds, so tossed by winds of passion and of prejudice, it felt the proudest assurance that it was doing both, at least that self-infatuation was shared all around the compass. | Buy | |
| The Cancer Ward | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13. Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote "Wing 13" on his admission card. They should have had the ingenuity to assign 13 to some kind of prosthetic or intestinal department. | Buy | |
| The Source | James A. Michener | On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, "If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn." | Buy | |
| The Source | James A Michener | On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, "If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn. | Buy | |
| Beyond This Place | Archibald Joseph Cronin | On Wednesday evenings Paul's mother took the tram from her work in the City Hall to the mid-week service at Merrion Chapel and he usually walked over from the university, after his five o'clock philosophy class, to meet her as she came out. But on this particular Wednesday, his interview with Professor Slade kept him late and, with a glance at his watch, he decided to go straight home. | Buy | |
| The Chapman Report | Irving Wallace | Once a day, at exactly ten minutes to nine in the morning, a long, gray sight-seeing bus, streaked with dust, lumbered up Sunset Boulevard and entered that suburb of Los Angeles known as The Briars. The uniformed guide and driver of the bus adjusted the silver microphone before his lips and resumed his soporific drone: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing through "The Briars . . ." | Buy | |
| Kon-Tiki | Thor Heyerdahl | Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. | Buy | |
| Daylight on Saturday | J B Priestly | Once inside the factory we shall have to stay there, so we had better take a quick look at it first from the outside. | Buy | |
| A Little Princess | Frances Hodgson Burnett | Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. | Buy | |
| Eloise at Christmastime | Kay Thompson | Once there was this little child You know her I believe Here's who she is me ELIOISE And it is Christmas Eve It's Christmas Eve With a blizzard outside And four below zero or more But inside the Plaza we're cozy and warm in our rooms on the tippy top floor Oooooooooooooooooooo! | Buy | |
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | C S Lewis | Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy. | Buy | |
| Loving | Henry Green | Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch. | Buy | |
| Masquerade | Kit Williams | Once upon a perfect night, unclouded and still, there came the face of a pale and beautiful lady. The tresses of her hair reached out to make the constellations, and the dewy vapours of her gown fell soft upon the land. | Buy | |
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . . | Buy | |
| Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. | Buy | |
| The Light in the Clearing | Irving Bacheller | Once upon a time I owned a watermelon. | Buy | |
| The Lonely Silver Rain | John D MacDonald | Once upon a time I was very lucky and located a sixty-five-foot hijacked motor sailer in a matter of days, after the authorities had been looking for months. | Buy | |
| Laughter in the Dark | Vladimir Nabokov | Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. | Buy | |
| Pinocchio | Carlo Collodi | Once upon a time there was . . . "A king!" my young readers will instantly exclaim. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood." | Buy | |
| Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook | Joyce Lanke Brisley | Once upon a time there was a little girl. She had a Father, a Mother, and a Grandpa, and a Grandma, and an Uncle, and an Aunty, and they all lived together in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof. | Buy | |
| Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert A. Heinlein | Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. | Buy | |
| Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert Heinlein | Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. | Buy | |
| The Tale of Peter Rabbit | Beatrix Potter | Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. | Buy | |
| The Child's Story | Charles Dickens | Once upon a time, a good many years ago, there was a traveller, and he set out upon a journey. | Buy | |
| The 13 Clocks | James Thurber | Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. | Buy | |
| The Thirteen Clocks | James Thurber | Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his neice, the Princess Saralinda. | Buy | |
| The Winter King | Bernard Cornwell | Once upon a time, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened. | Buy | |
| The Battle of Life | Charles Dickens | Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. | Buy | |
| Cujo | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. | Buy | |
| Little House in the Big Woods | Laura Ingalls Wilder | Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs. | Buy | |
| Back When We Were Grownups | Anne Tyler | Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned
into the wrong person. She was fifty-three years old by then--a grandmother. Wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a center part. Laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. A loose and colorful style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady. | Buy | |
| The Littlest Angel | Charles Tazewell | Once upon a time--oh, many, many years ago as time is calculated by men--but which was only Yesterday in the Celestial Calendar of Heaven--there was, in Paradise, a most miserable, thoroughly unhappy, and utterly dejected cherub who as known throughout Heaven as The Littlest Angel. | Buy | |
| The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificient picture in a book, called True Stories From Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. here is a copy of the drawing. | Buy | |
| Tropic of Capricorn | Henry Miller | Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. | Buy | |
| The Eyes of the Dragon | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything. Roland the Good was neither the best nor the worst King ever to rule the land. | Buy | |
| Who Moved My Cheese? | Spencer Johnson M D | Once, long ago in a land far away, there lived four little characters who ran through a maze looking for cheese to nourish them and make them happy. | Buy | |
| Shadows on the Rock | Willa Sibert Cather | One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him. | Buy | |
| We Are Not Alone | James Hilton | One cold gusty night in December a boy rang the bell of the doctor's house in Shawgate, and when Susan came to the door left word that there had been an accident to a dancer at the local theatre and would the doctor please come at once. | Buy | |
| Mysteries of Paris | Eugene Sue (Marie Joseph Eugene Sue) | One cold, rainy evening, toward the end of October, 1838, a man of athletic build, wearing an old broad-brimmed straw hat and a ragged slop, serge shirt, which came down over the hem of trousers of the same stuff, crossed the Pont-au-Change, and dived into the City ward of Paris, a maze of dark, narrow, and crooked streets, which spreads from the Palace of Justice to Notre Dame Cathedral. | Buy | |
| The Door in the Wall | H G Wells | One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall | Buy | |
| The Glass-Blowers | Daphne du Maurier | One day in the June of 1844 Madame Sophie Duval, nee Busson, eighty years of age and mother of the mayor of Vibraye, a small commune in the departement of Sarthe, rose from her chair in the salon of her property at le Gue de Launay, chose her favourite walkingstick from a stand in the hall, and calling to her dog made her way, as was her custom at this hour of the afternoon every Tuesday, down the short approach drive to the entrance gate. | Buy | |
| Cousin Betty | Honore de Balzac | One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard. | Buy | |
| Cousin Betty | Honore de Balzac | One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard. | Buy | |
| The Lover | Marguerite Duras | One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged. | Buy | |
| Blueberries for Sal | Robert McCloskey | One day, Little Sal went with her mother to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries. | Buy | |
| The Flayed Hand | Guy de Maupassant | One evening about eight months ago I met with some college comrades at the lodgings of our friend Louis R. We drank punch and smoked, talked of literature and art, and made jokes like any other company of young men. Suddenly the door flew open, and one who had been my friend since boyhood burst in like a hurricane. | Buy | |
| Back Street | Fannie Hurst | One evening in one of those Over-the-Rhine cafes which were plentiful along Vine Street of the Cincinnati of the nineties, a traveling salesman leaned across his stein of Moerlein's Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent. | Buy | |
| Memoirs of a Geisha | Arthur S. Golden | One evening in the spring of 1936, when I was a boy of fourteen, my father took me to a dance performance in Kyoto. I remember only two things about it. | Buy | |
| The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy | One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now. | Buy | |
| The Last Gentleman | Walker Percy | One fine day in early summer a young man lay thinking in Central Park. | Buy | |
| One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish | Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of Theodore Seuss Geisel) | One fish two fish red fish blue fish. | Buy | |
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch's ponds. One of them--fortyish, wearing a gray summer suit--was short, dark-haired, bald on top, paunchy, and held his proper fedora in his hand; black horn-rimmed glasses of supernatural proportions adorned his well-shaven face. The other one--a broad-shouldered, reddish-haired, shaggy young man with a checked cap cocked on the back of his head--was wearing a cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black sneakers. | Buy | |
| The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro | Harry Stephen Keeler | One hundred and twenty miles more - two hours at the most - and he would be in Chicago, at the end of this strangest of all journeys that had carried him exactly half around the terrestrial globe. | Buy | |
| O Pioneers! | Willa Sibert Cather | One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. | Buy | |
| Wayside 609 | Owen Gault | One look at the honey haired blonde behind the wheel of the convertible convinced me I wouldn't need a Greyhound bus to get where I was going after all. | Buy | |
| Howards End | E M Forster | One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister. | Buy | |
| The Martian Chronicles | Ray Bradbury | One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets. | Buy | |
| Heaven's My Destination | Thornton Niven Wilder | One morning in the late summer of 1930 the proprietor and several guests at the Union Hotel at Crestcrego, Texas, were annoyed to discover Biblical texts freshly written across the blotter on the public writing-desk. | Buy | |
| Let the People Sing | J B Priestly | One morning last autumn a little man with a large sad face turned out of Midland Street, Birchester, and climbed the stairs next to the sewing-machine shop. | Buy | |
| Jennie Gerhardt | Theodore Dreiser | One morning, in the fall of 1880, a middle-aged woman, accompanied by a young girl of eighteen, presented herself at the clerk's desk of the principal hotel in Columbus, Ohio, and made inquiry as to whether there was anything about the place that she could do. | Buy | |
| Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour | J.D. Salinger | One night some twenty years ago, during a siege of mumps in our enormous family, my youngest sister, Franny, was moved, crib and all, into the ostensibly germ-free room I shared with my eldest brother, Seymour. I was fifteen, Seymour was seventeen. Along about two in the morning, the new roommate's crying wakened me. I lay in a still, neutral position for a few minutes, listening to the racket, till I heard, or felt, Seymour stir in the bed next to mine. | Buy | |
| A Widow for One Year | John Irving | One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking--it was coming from her parents' bedroom. | Buy | |
| Old St. Paul's | William Harrison Ainsworth | One night, at the latter end of April 1665, the family of a citizen of London carrying on an extensive business as a grocer in Wood Street, Cheapside, were assembled, according to custom, at prayer. | Buy | |
| B.F.'s Daughter | John Phillips Marquand | One noon in mid-December when Tom had been called suddenly to Washington, Polly took the train from New York to spend the night at their country place in Pyefield. | Buy | |
| A High Wind in Jamaica | Richard Hughes | One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is the number of the ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone's throw of them: ruined slaves' quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansions that were too expensive to maintain. | Buy | |
| Making It | Norman Podhoretz | One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan--or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan. | Buy | |
| Earth and High Heaven | Gwethalyn Graham | One of the questions they were sometimes asked was where and how they had met, for Marc Reiser was a Jew, originally from a small town in northern Ontario, and from 1933 until he went overseas in September, 1942, a junior partner in the law firm of Maresch and Aaronson in Montreal, and Erica Drake was a Gentile, one of the Westmount Drakes. | Buy | |
| Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | Tennessee Williams | One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I have t' change! | Buy | |
| Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Sibert Cather | One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. | Buy | |
| The Pinballs | Betsy Byars | One summer two boys and a girl went to a foster home to live together. One of the boys was Harvey. He had two broken legs. He got them when he was run over by his father's new Grand Am. | Buy | |
| The Wall | John Hersey | One sunny day in the summer after the end of the war, a search party found the Levinson Archive buried in seventeen iron boxes and a number of small parcels, the latter wrapped in rags and old clothes, under the sites of what had been, before the razing of the entire Warsaw ghetto, Nowolipki Street 68 and Swientojerska Street 34. | Buy | |
| Eloise in Paris | Kay Thompson | One teatime this telephone was ringing its head off so I picked it up and oh my Lord it was the front desk saying Eloise there's a cablegram down here for you do you want us to send it up? | Buy | |
| Through the Looking Glass | Lewis Carroll | One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it--it was the black kitten's fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat, for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn't have had any hand in the mischief. | Buy | |
| Them | Joyce Carol Oates | One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror. | Buy | |
| The Door into Summer | Robert A. Heinlein | One winter before the Six Weeks War my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. | Buy | |
| All in the Family | Edwin O'Connor | One year, when I was a boy--eleven, going on twelve--my father took me to Ireland. We went because of a tragedy, a family tragedy which was really my first experience with sadness of any kind. | Buy | |
| To be Read at Dusk | Charles Dickens | One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them. | Buy | |
| Centennial | James A. Michener | Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door. | Buy | |
| Christy | Catherine Marshall (Sarah Catherine Wood Marshall) | Only my father saw me to the Asheville station that Sunday morning in 1912. Mother had gotten up early to fix us a hot breakfast. It was one of those moments that would be as sharp and real in my mind years later as it was that January morning: that particular look of love and longing in mother's eyes; the smell of the starch in her crisp white apron; the hissing of the pine resin in the big iron stove; the lake of melted butter in the steaming mound of hominy grits on my plate. | Buy | |
| The Fox in the Attic | Richard Hughes | Only the steady creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, labouring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea. | Buy | |
| The Shadow-Line | Joseph Conrad | Only the young have such moments. | Buy | |
| A Little Learning | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography. | Buy | |
| King Henry the Fourth, Part II | William Shakespeare | Open your ears, for which of you will stop The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth. | Buy | |
| The Rockpile | James Baldwin | Other boys were to be seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. | Buy | |
| The General Danced at Dawn | George MacDonald Fraser | Our coal bunker is old, and it stands beneath an ivy hedge, so that when I go to it in wet weather, I catch the combined smells of damp earth and decaying vegetation. | Buy | |
| Appointment in Samarra | John O'Hara | Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep. | Buy | |
| Lady Chatterley's Lover | David Herbert Lawrence | Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter now many skies have fallen. | Buy | |
| Lady Chatterley's Lover | D H Lawrence | Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically | Buy | |
| The Plutocrat | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | Out of the north Atlantic a January storm came down in the night, sweeping the American coast with wind and snow and sleet upon a great oblique front from Nova Scotia to the Delaware capes. | Buy | |
| The Lure of the Mask | Harold MacGrath | Out of the unromantic night, out of the somber blurring January fog, came a voice lifted in song, a soprano, rich, full and round, young yet matured, sweet and mysterious as a night-bird's, haunting and elusive as the murmur of the sea in a shell: a lilt from La Fille de Madame Angot, a light opera long since forgotten in New York. Hillard, genuinely astonished, lowered his pipe and listened. | Buy | |
| As the Earth Turns | Gladys Hasty Carroll | Outside the house it was storming, a busy downfall of flakes that the wind blew lightly across acres of old snow left from December. | Buy | |
| Mrs. Parkington | Louis Bromfield | Outside the snow was falling, thickly in great wet flakes, so that the sound of the traffic on Park Avenue coming through the drawn curtains was muted and distant. | Buy | |
| The Hills at Home | Nancy Clark | Outside, the night blew perfectly foul and all of the Hills had stayed at home. | Buy | |
| The Portygee | Joseph Crosby Lincoln | Overhead the clouds cloaked the sky; a ragged cloak it was, and, here and there, a star shone through a hole, to be obscured almost instantly as more cloud tatters were hurled across the rent. | Buy |