| The Odd Sea | Frederick Reiken | Years ago, on New Year's Day, my older brother, Ethan, and I went skating on a river. | Buy | |
| Mary Anne | Daphne du Maurier | Years later, when she had gone and was no longer part of their
lives, the thing they remembered about her was her smile. | Buy | |
| The Melting of Molly | Maria Thompson Daviess | Yes, I truly think that in all the world there is nothing so dead
as a young widow's deceased husband, and God ought to give His
wisest man-angel special charge concerning looking after her and
the devil at the same time. They both need it! | Buy | |
| The Immoralist | André Gide | Yes, my dear brother, Michel has spoken to us, as you thought he
would. Here is the account he gave us. You asked to hear it and
I promised to tell you, but at the point of sending it to you I
still hesitate; the more times I reread it, the more terrible it
seems. Oh, what will you think of our friend? For that matter,
what do I think of him myself. | Buy | |
| Raintree County | Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr | Yes, sir, here's the Glorious Fourth again. | Buy | |
| Jailbird | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | Yes--Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the
outside. That is no disgrace. A lot of good people can't make
it on the outside. | Buy | |
| Lycidas | John Milton | Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more, /Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere. | Buy | |
| If on a Winter's Night a Traveler | Italo Calvino | You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If
on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel
very other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to
close the door; the TV is always on in next room. Tell the
others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your
voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want
to be disturbed!" | Buy | |
| The Color Purple | Alice Walker | You better not never tell nobody but God. | Buy | |
| The Screaming Mimi | Frederic Brown | You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. | Buy | |
| Crackdown | Bernard Cornwell | You cannot cheat death. | Buy | |
| Clear and Present Danger | Tom Clancy | You couldn't look at her and not be proud, Red Wegener told
himself. The Coast Guard cutter Panache was one of a
kind, a design mistake of sorts, but she was his. Her hull was
painted the same gleaming white found on an iceberg--except for
the orange stripe on the bow that designated the ship as part of
the United States Coast Guard. | Buy | |
| Cymbeline | William Shakespeare | You do not meet a man but frowns. Our bloods
No more obey the heavens than our courtiers
Still seem as does the King's. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) | You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name
of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That
book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the
truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time
or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe
Mary. Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she is--and Mary, and the
Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a
true book, with some stretchers, as I said before. | Buy | |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter | Buy | |
| Flashman and the Tiger | George MacDonald Fraser | You don't know Blowitz, probably never heard of him even, which is your good luck, although I dare say if you'd met him you'd have thought him harmless enough. | Buy | |
| Rob Roy | Walter Dill Scott | You have requested me, my dear friend, to bestow some of that
leisure, with which Providence has blessed the decline of my
life, in registering hazards and difficulties which attended its
commencement. | Buy | |
| Young Man of Manhattan | Katharine Brush | You have seen him, perhaps, where the bands are playing and the
pennants flying and the people cheering. He is always there;
diligent there. | Buy | |
| Up Island | Anne Rivers Siddons | You know how people are always saying "I knew it by the back of
my neck" when they mean those occasional scalding slashes of
human intuition that later prove to be true? My mother was
always saying it, though she was not always right. Nevertheless,
in my half-Celt family, the back of one's neck is a hallowed
harbinger of things to come. | Buy | |
| Never Change | Elizabeth Berg | You know people like me. I'm the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom, but never going--even though in the late sixties, only nerds went to proms. But I would have gone. I would have happily gone; I would have been so happy. I wanted the phone call with the rough voice asking "Would you. . .?" | Buy | |
| The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë | You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827. | Buy | |
| Shadow of a Tiger | Michael Collins | You never see a Chinese drunk. | Buy | |
| Prince Otto | Robert Louis Stevenson | You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. | Buy | |
| Frankenstein | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the
commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such
evil forebodings. | Buy | |
| The Doctor | Mary Roberts Rinehart | Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting
himself after a night's sleep. | Buy | |
| Poor No More | Robert Chester Ruark | Young Sam Price stepped out of a patch of gray-dusty,
dry-scraggly mesquite. | Buy | |
| The Drifters | James A. Michener | Youth is truth. | Buy | |
