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| Books in database: 3191 | ||||||||
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| Jalna | Mazo de la Roche | Wakefield Whiteoak ran on and on, faster and faster, till he could run no farther. | Buy | |
| A Single Man | Christopher Isherwood | Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. | Buy | |
| Sons | Pearl S. Buck | Wang Lung lay dying. | Buy | |
| Daniel Deronda | George Eliot | Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion, and not as a longing in which the whole being consents? | Buy | |
| Cat & Mouse | James B. Patterson | Washington, D.C. The Cross house was twenty paces away and the proximity and sight of it made Gary Soneji's skin prickle. It was Victorian style, white shingled, and extremely well kept. As Soneji stared across Fifth Street, he slowly bared his teeth in a sneer that could have passed for a smile. This was perfect. He had come to murder Alex Cross and his family. | Buy | |
| All Quiet on the Western Front | Erich Maria Remarque | We are at rest five miles behind the front. | Buy | |
| Time To Hunt | Stephen Hunter | We are in the presence of a master sniper. | Buy | |
| Mardi: and a Voyage of Thither | Herman Melville | We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to sea like the baying of a hound. | Buy | |
| A Death in the Family | James Agee | We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child | Buy | |
| Old Yeller | Fred Gipson | We called him Old Yeller. | Buy | |
| When Knighthood Was in Flower | Charles Major | We Caskodens take great pride in our ancestry. Some persons, I know, hold all that to be totally un-Solomonlike and the height of vanity, but, they, usually, have no ancestors of whom to be proud. | Buy | |
| Dead Man's Walk | Richard S Prather | We could see the low, bone-white hotel now, its wings curving toward the sea like the base of a sun-bleached skull. | Buy | |
| The Mosquito Coast | Paul Theroux | We drove past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five miles into Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the awfulness of America - how it got turned into a dope-taking, door locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks. | Buy | |
| Sketches of Young Gentlemen | Charles Dickens | We found ourself seated at a small dinner party the other day, opposite a stranger of such singular appearance and manner, that he irresistibly attracted our attention. | Buy | |
| A Certain Smile | Francoise Sagan (pseudonym of Francoise Quoirez) | We had spent the afternoon in a cafe on the Rue Saint-Jacques, a spring afternoon just like any other. | Buy | |
| The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families | Mary Bray Pipher | We have a six-foot corn plant in our office waiting room. It's not a good environment for a plant. There are no windows, little kids tear off its leaves, and we therapists, who are known for our nurturing abilities, keep forgetting to water it and dust its leaves. Sometime in the late 1980s we gave it plant food. But month after month, as old leaves turn brown and drop off, fresh green leaves sprout from its center. The corn plant is a good metaphor for families--it's plain, not at all exotic or even attractive, and it's in a hostile environment. But its surviving. | Buy | |
| Flyaway | Desmond Bagley | We live in the era of instancy. | Buy | |
| The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood | We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball net were still in place, though the nets were gone. | Buy | |
| Free Fall in Crimson | John D MacDonald | We talked past midnight, sat in the deck chairs on the sun deck of the Busted Flush with the starry April sky overhead, talked quietly, and listened to the night. | Buy | |
| Going Nowhere Fast | Gar Anthony Haywood | We thought we had lost Bad Dog in Las Vegas. | Buy | |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | We were at prep, when the head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every boy rose to his feet as though surprised in his labours. | Buy | |
| Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas | Hunter S. Thompson | We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . ." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. | Buy | |
| Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream | Hunter S Thompson | We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. | Buy | |
| We Were the Mulvaneys | Joyce Carol Oates | We were the Mulvaneys, remember us? | Buy | |
| Child of Storm | H Rider Haggard | We white people think that we know everything. | Buy | |
| Henry Reed's Baby-Sitting Service | Keith Robertson | Well, here I am back in Grover's Corner, New Jersey. | Buy | |
| Saturn over the Water | J B Priestly | Well, here it is, the whole thing, about ninety thousands words, I imagine. | Buy | |
| Tom Sawyer, Detective | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | Well, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw. | Buy | |
| Redburn | Herman Melville | Wellingborough, as you are going to sea, suppose you take this shooting-jacket of mine along; it's just the thing--take it, it will save the expense of another. | Buy | |
| The Puppet Masters | Robert A. Heinlein | Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? | Buy | |
| Behindlings | Nicola Barker | Wesley glanced behind him. Two people followed, but at a sensible distance. | Buy | |
| Trustee from the Toolroom | Nevil Shute (Nevil Shute Norway) | West Ealing is a suburb to the west of London, and Keith Stewart lives there in the lower part of No. 56 Somerset Road. No. 56 is an unusual house and a peculiarly ugly one, a detached house standing in a row but in a fairly spacious garden, four storeys high if you include the basement, a tall, thin slip of a house. | Buy | |
| The Last of the Barons | Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton | Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but, even then, no longer solitary, hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of Westminister and London. | Buy | |
| The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. | Buy | |
| Kitty Foyle | Christopher Darlington Morley | What a grand guy. Sometimes he used to sneak a slug of whiskey in the forenoon, against doctor's orders. | Buy | |
| Love Story | Erich Segal | What can you say about a 25 year old girl who died? | Buy | |
| Dolores Claiborne | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | What did you ask, Andy Bissette? Do I "understand these rights as you've explained em to me"? Gorry! What makes some men so numb? | Buy | |
| A Return to Love | Marianne Williamson | What happened to my generation is that we never grew up. The problem isn't that we're lost or apathetic, narcissistic or materialistic. The problem is we're terrified. | Buy | |
| The Rebel | Albert Camus | What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying "no"? | Buy | |
| The Road Back | Erich Maria Remarque | What is still left of Number 2 Platoon is quartered in a stretch of battered trench behind the line, and most of them are dozing. | Buy | |
| Henderson the Rain King | Saul Bellow | What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated. | Buy | |
| The Defense | Vladimir Nabokov | What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin. His father--the real Luzhin, the elderly Luzhin, the writer of books--left the nursery with a smile, rubbing his hands (already smeared for the night with transparent cold cream), and with his suede-slippered evening gait padded back to his bedroom. His wife lay in bed. She half raised herself and said: "Well, how did it go?" | Buy | |
| The Call of the Canyon | Zane Grey | What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley Burch laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window. | Buy | |
| The Cardinal | Henry Morton Robinson | What vehicle, bottle-green in color, arkish in shape, cranky in motion, and dilapidated in repose, was a familiar feature of the Mystic River flatlands between Boston and Medford during the early years of the present century? | Buy | |
| A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | What's it going to be then, eh? | Buy | |
| The Day of the Triffids | John Wyndham | When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. | Buy | |
| Hunter | Richard Stark | When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. | Buy | |
| The Plastic Age | Percy Marks | When an American sets out to found a college, he hunts first for a hill. John Harvard was an Englishman and indifferent to high places. The result is that Harvard has become a university of vast proportions and no color. | Buy | |
| Revolt in the Desert | Thomas Edward Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") | When at last we anchored in Jeddah's outer harbour, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. | Buy | |
| Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry | When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake--not a very big one. | Buy | |
| The Magic Walking Stick | John Buchan | When Bill came back for long-leave that autumn half, he had before him a complicated programme of entertainment | Buy | |
| Advise and Consent | Allen Stuart Drury | When Bob Munson awoke in his apartment at the Sheraton-Park Hotel at seven thirty-one in the morning he had the feeling it would be a bad day. | Buy | |
| Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser | When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small truck, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. | Buy | |
| Far from the Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy | When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun. | Buy | |
| The History of Henry Esmond | William Makepeace Thackeray | When Francis, fourth Viscount Castlewood, came to his title, and presently after to take possession of his house of Castlewood, County Hants, in the year 1691, almost the only tenant of the place besides the domestics was a lad of twelve years of age, of whom no one seemed to take any note until my Lady Viscountess lighted upon him, going over the house with the housekeeper on the day of her arrival. | Buy | |
| The Mortal Storm | Phyllis Bottome | When Freya woke up, she felt as if she were recovering from a long and painful illness, out of the reach for the first time of all disagreeable sensations. | Buy | |
| Sword of Honour | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | When Guy Crouchback's grandparents, Gervase and Hermione, came to Italy on their honeymoon, French troops manned the defences of Rome, the Sovereign Pontiff drove out in an open carriage and Cardinals took their exercise side-saddle on the Pincian Hill. | Buy | |
| The Seventh | Richard Stark | When he didn't get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. | Buy | |
| From Here to Eternity | James Jones | When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh. | Buy | |
| Nobody Runs Forever | Richard Stark | When he saw that the one called Harbin was wearing a wire, Parker said, 'Deal me out a hand,' and got to his feet. | Buy | |
| An Outcast of the Islands | Joseph Conrad | When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect. | Buy | |
| Anatomy of a Killer | Peter Rabe | When he was done in the room he stepped away quickly because the other man was falling his way. | Buy | |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. | Buy | |
| The Groves of Academe | Mary McCarthy | When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer. | Buy | |
| The Sure Thing | Richard S Prather | When I answered the phone in the living room of my three-rooms-and-a-bath, Eddy, the day man downstairs at the desk of the Spartan Apartment Hotel, said softly: "Shell, there's some kind of a weird guy down here, says he wants to see you." | Buy | |
| Stella | Jan de Hartog | When I arrived in England early in the war, after escaping from occupied Holland, I was appointed captain of an ocean-going tugboat on the Western Approaches. | Buy | |
| The Shadowers | Donald Hamilton | When I came hurriedly out of the hotel, the car was waiting for me. | Buy | |
| A Confederate General from Big Sur | Richard Brautigan | When I first heard about Big Sur I didn't know that it was a member of the Confederate States of America. | Buy | |
| Out On The Cutting Edge | Lawrence Block | When I imagine it, it is always a perfect summer day, with the sun high in a vivid blue sky. | Buy | |
| Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. | Buy | |
| Brideshead Revisted | Evelyn Waugh | When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view before me through the grey mist of early morning | Buy | |
| Under the Net | Iris Murdoch | When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong. | Buy | |
| The Outsiders | S.E. Hinton | When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. | Buy | |
| Darkness Take My Hand | Denis Lehane | When I was a kid, my father took me up on the roof of a freshly burned building. | Buy | |
| The Way of All Flesh | Samuel Butler | When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick. He must have been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier than which date I suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born in 1802. . . . His name was Pontifex. | Buy | |
| Sermons and Soda-Water | John O'Hara | When I was first starting out in New York I wrote quite a few obituaries of men who were presumably in good health, but who were no longer young. | Buy | |
| Ellen Foster | Kaye Gibbons | When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. | Buy | |
| Quest for a Maid | Frances Mary Hendry | When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king. | Buy | |
| No Highway | Nevil Shute (Nevil Shute Norway) | When I was put in charge of the Structural Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, I was thirty-four years old. That made a few small difficulties at first, because most of my research staff were a good deal older than I was, and most of them considered it a very odd appointment. | Buy | |
| Endless Love | Scott Spencer | When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved - I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. | Buy | |
| I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou | When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - "To Whom It May Concern" - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson. | Buy | |
| Four Letters of Love | Niall Williams | When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. | Buy | |
| Travels with Charley | John Ernst Steinbeck | When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. | Buy | |
| Walden | Henry David Thoreau | When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. | Buy | |
| The Vixens | Frank Yerby | When it was over, it was not really over, and that was the trouble. | Buy | |
| Gravedigger | Joseph Hansen | When last he had noticed, nothing was out here but bare hills above an empty beach. | Buy | |
| The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. | Buy | |
| Once Is Not Enough | Jacqueline Susann | When Mike Wayne walked into the V.I.P. Lounge at Kennedy Airport, the hostess was positive he was a movie star. He had that look of someone you've seen many times but know you've never met. | Buy | |
| The Fellowship of the Ring | J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) | When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. | Buy | |
| Port Of Saints | William S Burroughs | When Mr. Wilson, the American Consul, arrived at his office he noticed a young man sitting by the reception desk, and he hoped that whatever the young man wanted could be handled by the Vice Consul, Mr. Carter. | Buy | |
| Stuart Little | E B White | When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. | Buy | |
| The Secret Woman | Victoria Holt | When my Aunt Charlotte died suddenly many people believed that I had killed her and that if it had not been for Nurse Loman's evidence at the inquest, the verdict would have been one of murder by some person or persons unknown; there would have been a probing into the dark secrets of the Queen's House, and the truth would have come out. | Buy | |
| The Great Brain at the Academy | John D Fitzgerald | When my brother Tom began telling people in Adenville, Utah, that he had a great brain everybody laughed at him, including his own family. | Buy | |
| Lost Ecstasy | Mary Roberts Rinehart | When old Lucius Dowling lay dying he sent for his will and reread it. | Buy | |
| The Ramage Touch | Dudley Pope | When Ramage eventually succeeded in focusing the night-glass on the two distant ships, because it showed an inverted image they were faintly outlined against the stars and looked like bats hanging side by side and upside down from a beam. | Buy | |
| The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin | David Nobbs | When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus. | Buy | |
| Macbeth | William Shakespeare | When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? | Buy | |
| Three Loves | Archibald Joseph Cronin | When she had finished dressing, Lucy went to her bedroom window, but there was still no sign of Frank. And absently she stood behind the long lace curtain, letting her eyes mirror the white stretch of road which followed the estuary shore towards the town, nearly a mile away. | Buy | |
| A Flash of Green | John D MacDonald | When she heard the rattle of the old tin wheelbarrow, Kat Hubble knew it was after four. | Buy | |
| This Above All | Eric Mobray Knight | When spring was almost done the war began in earnest. | Buy | |
| The Money Moon | Jeffrey Farnol | When Sylvia Marchmont went to Europe, George Bellew being, at the same time, desirous of testing his newest acquired yacht, followed her, and mutual friends in New York, Newport, and elsewhere, confidently awaited news of their engagement. | Buy | |
| Breakout | Richard Stark | When the alarm went off, Parker and Armiston were far to the rear of the warehouse, Armiston with the clipboard, checking off the boxes they'd want. | Buy | |
| Comeback | Richard Stark | When the angel opened the door, Parker stepped first past the threshold into the darkness of the cinder block corridor beneath the stage. | Buy | |
| The Man with the Getaway Face | Richard Stark | When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. | Buy | |
| The Score | Richard Stark | When the bellboy left, Parker went over to the house phone and made his call. | Buy | |
| Backflash | Richard Stark | When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. | Buy | |
| Bel-Ami | Guy de Maupassant | When the cashier had given him change for his 5-franc piece, Georges Duroy left the restaurant. | Buy | |
| Flashfire | Richard Stark | When the dashboard clock read 2:40, Parker drove out of the drugstore parking lot and across the sunlit road to the convenience store/gas station. | Buy | |
| When a Man Marries | Mary Roberts Rinehart | When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised all kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come and got in the papers and every one--but ourselves--laughed himself black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their one! | Buy | |
| Crow Lake | Mary Lawson | When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn't until long afterward that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. | Buy | |
| The Handle | Richard Stark | When the engine stopped, Parker came up on deck for a look around. | Buy | |
| The Winter of Our Discontent | John Ernst Steinbeck | When the fair cold morning of April stirred Mary Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little fingers pulling a frog mouth at her. | Buy | |
| The Mourner | Richard Stark | When the guy with the asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. | Buy | |
| The Jugger | Richard Stark | When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. | Buy | |
| Kristin Lavransdatter | Sigrid Undset | When the lands and goods of Ivar Gjesling the younger, of Sundbu, were divided after his death in 1306, his lands in Sil of Gudbrandsdal fell to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Lavrans Björngulfsön. | Buy | |
| Verdict in Blood | Gail Bowen | When the phone on my bedside table shrilled in the early hours of Labour Day morning, I had the receiver pressed to my ear before the second ring. | Buy | |
| The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle | Haruki Murukami | When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. | Buy | |
| Firebreak | Richard Stark | When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. | Buy | |
| The Deliverance | Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow | When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the June sunshine. | Buy | |
| In the Bishop's Carriage | Miriam Michelson | When the thing was at its hottest, I bolted. Tom, like the darling he is--(Yes, you are, old fellow, you're as precious to me as--as you are to the police--if they could only get their hands on you)--well, Tom drew off the crowd, having passed the old gentleman's watch to me, and I made for the women's rooms. | Buy | |
| Sweet Thursday | John Ernst Steinbeck | When the war came to Monterey and to Cannery Row everybody fought it more or less, in one way or another. | Buy | |
| The Fourth Durango | Ross Thomas | When the white bedside telephone rang at 4:03 A.M. on that last Friday in June, the 36-year-old mayor answered the call halfway through its fourth ring and kicked the 39-year-old chief of police on the ankle to make sure he too was awake. | Buy | |
| The Outfit | Richard Stark | When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. | Buy | |
| The Crossing | Cormac McCarthy | When they came south of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child. In the country they'd quit lay the bones of a sister and the bones of his maternal grandmother. The new county was rich and wild. You could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a crossfence. | Buy | |
| Contact | Carl Sagan | When they pulled her out, she was not crying at all. Her tiny brow was wrinkled, and then her eyes grew wide. She looked at the bright lights, the white- and green-clad figures, the woman lying on the table below her. Somehow familiar sounds washed over her. On her face was an odd expression for a newborn--puzzlement perhaps. | Buy | |
| Politically Correct Bedtime Stories | James Finn Garner | When they were first written, the stories on which the following tales are based certainly served their purpose--to entrench the patriarchy, to estrange people from their own natural impulses, to demonize "evil" and to "reward" an objective "good." However much we might like to, we cannot blame the Brothers Grimm for their insensitively to woman's issues, minority cultures, and the environment. | Buy | |
| Staying On | Paul Mark Scott | When Tucker Smalley died of a massive coronary at approximately 9:30 a.m. on the last Monday in April, 1972, his wife Lucy was out, having her white hair blue-rinsed and set in Seraglio Room on the ground floor of Pankot's new five-storey glass and concrete hotel, The Shiraz. | Buy | |
| One | Richard Bach | When we met twenty-five years ago, I was an airplane pilot entranced by flight, looking for meanings behind instruments and airspeeds. | Buy | |
| Good-bye, Mr. Chips | James Hilton | When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape. | Buy | |
| Don't Just Die There | Henry Kane | When you toady about with millionaires, the bullfrog starts its croaking. | Buy | |
| Framley Parsonage | Anthony Trollope | When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition. | Buy | |
| Testimony of Two Men | Taylor Caldwell | When young Robert Sylvester Morgan had occasion to write his mother he always made what he wryly called "a first draft." | Buy | |
| The Unnamable | Samuel Beckett | Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. | Buy | |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. | Buy | |
| Scoop | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh | While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters. | Buy | |
| Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour | Buy | |
| Silence on the Shore | Hugh Garner | While Walter Fowler waited for the taxi driver to place his bags on the sidewalk, he stared at the house across the May-green grass of its narrow lawn. | Buy | |
| The Man In The Iron Mask | Alexandre Dumas | Whilst every one at court was busily engaged upon his own affairs, a man mysteriously entered a house situated behind the Place de Grève. | Buy | |
| The Notebook | Nicholas Sparks | Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end? | Buy | |
| Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | Who is John Galt? | Buy | |
| Curtain | Agatha Christie | Who is there who has not felt a sudden startled pang at reliving an old experience or feeling an old emotion? | Buy | |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot | Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? | Buy | |
| Hamlet Prince of Denmark | William Shakespeare | Who's there? | Buy | |
| A Tale of a Tub | Jonathan Swift | Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them. Now, in all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point, it being as hard to get quit of number as of hell. | Buy | |
| Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings | Charles Dickens | Whoever would begin to be worried with letting Lodgings that wasn't a lone woman with a living to get is a thing inconceivable to me my dear; excuse the familiarity, but it comes natural to me in my own little room, when wishing to open my mind to those that I can trust, and I should be truly thankful if they were all mankind, but such is not so, for have but a Furnished bill in the window and your watch on the mantelpiece, and farewell to it if you turn your back for a second, however gentlemanly the manners; nor is being of your own sex any safeguard, as I have reason, in the form of sugar-tongs to know, for that lady (and a fine woman she was) got me to run for a glass of water, on the plea of going to be confined, which certainly turned out to be true, but it was in the Station-house. | Buy | |
| Daniel Martin | John Fowles | Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation. | Buy | |
| The Rescue | Nicholas Sparks | Why had this happened? Why, of all the children, was Kyle the one? | Buy | |
| King Solomon's Ring | Konrad Zacharias Lorenz | Why should I tell of the darker side of life with animals? Because the degree of one's willingness to bear with this darker side is the measure of one's love for animals. I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents who only shook their heads or sighed when, as a schoolboy or young student, I once again brought home a new and probably yet more destructive pet? And what has my wife put up with, in the course of the years? | Buy | |
| Seventeen | Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) | William Sylvanus Baxter paused for a moment of though in front of the drug-store at the corner of Washington Street and Central Avenue. | Buy | |
| Guilty Pleasures | Laurell K Hamilton | Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn't change that. He sat across from me, wearing a loud plaid sport jacket. | Buy | |
| The Heart of the Matter | Graham Henry Greene | Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. | Buy | |
| The Heart of the Matter | Graham Greene | Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. | Buy | |
| King Suckerman | George Pelecanos | Wilton Cooper reached for the speaker, counterclockwised the volume. | Buy | |
| Eragon | Christopher Paolini | Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world. | Buy | |
| Sunwing | Ken Oppel | Wings trimmed tight, Shade sailed through the forest. | Buy | |
| No Time for Tears | Cynthia Freeman | Winter was a time to be feared. It meant hunger and idleness. It came upon them like a plague, a punishment meted out for all their sins of five thousand years. Would God ever forgive them? In time--in time, even if man never would. | Buy | |
| The Search for my Great-Uncle's Head | Jonathan Latimer | With a hollow rattle of its muffler the Greyhound bus disappeared down the cement road and left me in the darkness. | Buy | |
| Adam Bede | George Eliot | With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. | Buy | |
| The Poison Oracle | Peter Dickinson | With as much passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window. | Buy | |
| The Carolinian | Rafael Sabatini | With compressed lips and an upright line of pain between his brows Mr. Harry Latimer sat down to write a letter. | Buy | |
| The Inside of the Cup | Winston Churchill | With few exceptions, the incidents recorded in these pages take place in one of the largest cities of the United States of America, and of that portion called the Middle West,--a city once conservative and provincial, and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them, and linked by lightning limited trains to other teeming centers of the modern world: a city overtaken, in recent years, by the plague which has swept our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific--Prosperity. | Buy | |
| Doctor Faustus | Thomas Mann | With utmost emphasis I wish to attest that it is not out of any desire to thrust my own person into the foreground that I offer a few words about myself and my circumstances in preface to this account of the life of the last Adrian Leverkuhn, to this first and certainly very provisional biography of a musical genius, a revered man sorely tried by fate, which both raised him up and cast him down. | Buy | |
| Pigs in Heaven | Barbara Kingsolver | Women on their own run in Alice's family. | Buy | |
| The Ability to Kill | Eric Ambler | Word goes round the court that the jury is returning. | Buy |