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| Books in database: 3164 | ||||||||
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| Sabbath's Theater | Philip Roth | Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over. | Buy | |
| Sackett’s Land | Louis L'Amour | It was my devil's own temper that brought me to grief, my temper and a skill with weapons born of my father's teaching. | Buy | |
| Sacred | Denis Lehane | A piece of advice: If you ever follow someone in my neighborhood, don't wear pink. | Buy | |
| Saggy Baggy Elephant | Kathryn Jackson and Byron Jackson | A happy little elephant was dancing through the jungle. He thought he was dancing beautifully, one-two-three-kick. But whenever he went one-two-three, his big feet pounded so that they shook the whole jungle. | Buy | |
| Salthaven | W W Jacobs | Mr John Vyner, shipowner, pushed his chair back from his writing-table and gazed with kindly condescenion at the chief clerk as he stood before it with a handful of papers. | Buy | |
| Samaritan | Richard Price | Ray Mitchell, white, forty-three, and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Ruby, sat perched on the top slat of a playground bench in the heart of the Hopewell Houses, a twenty-four-tower low-income housing project in the city of Dempsy, New Jersey. | Buy | |
| Sanctuary | William Faulkner | From behind the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. | Buy | |
| Sanctuary | William Faulkner | From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man--a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm--emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring. | Buy | |
| Sanditon | Jane Austen | A gentleman and a lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex coast which lies between Hastings and Eastbourne, being induced by business to quit the high road and attempt a very rough land, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent, half rock, half sand. | Buy | |
| Sandy | Alice Caldwell Rice | An English mist was rolling lazily inland from the sea. It half enveloped the two great ocean liners that lay tugging at their moorings in the bay, and settled over the wharf with a grim determination to check, as far as possible, the traffic of the morning. | Buy | |
| Sapphira and the Slave Girl | Willa Sibert Cather | Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table. | Buy | |
| Saratoga Trunk | Edna Ferber | They were interviewing Clint Maroon. | Buy | |
| Sartoris | William Faulkner | As usual, old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him, had walked three miles in from the county Poor Farm, fetching, like an odor, like the clean dusty smell of his faded overalls, the spirit of the dead man into that room where the dead man's son sat and where the two of them, pauper and banker, would sit for a half an hour in the company of him who had passed beyond death and then returned. | Buy | |
| Satan Sanderson | Hallie Erminie Rives | "To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth." | Buy | |
| Saturday Night and Sunday Morning | Alan Sillitoe | The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom. | Buy | |
| Saturn over the Water | J B Priestly | Well, here it is, the whole thing, about ninety thousands words, I imagine. | Buy | |
| Scarlet Sister Mary | Julia Mood Peterkin | The black people who live in the Quarters at Blue Brook Plantation believe they are far the best black people living on the whole "Neck," as they call that long, narrow, rich strip of land lying between the sea on one side and the river with its swamps and deserted rice-fields on the other. | Buy | |
| Scarlett | Alexandra Ripley | This will be over soon, and then I can go home to Tara. | Buy | |
| Scenes from Provincial Life | William Cooper | The school at which I was science-master was desirably situated, right in the centre of the town. | Buy | |
| Scenes of Clerical Life | George Eliot | Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes! | Buy | |
| Schindler's List | Thomas Keneally | In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and--in the lapel of the dinner jacket--a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine. | Buy | |
| 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 | |
| Scruples | Judith Krantz | In Beverly Hills only the infirm and senile do not drive their own cars. The local police are accustomed to odd combinations of vehicle and driver: the stately, nearsighted retired banker making an illegal left-hand turn in his Dino Ferrari, the teen-ager speeding to a tennis lesson in a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce Corniche, the matronly civic leader blithely parking her bright red Jaguar at a bus stop. | Buy | |
| Scuffy the Tugboat | Gertrude Crampton | Scuffy was sad. Scuffy was cross. Scuffy sniffed his blue smokestack. | Buy | |
| Sea Of Death | Jorge Amado | Night was running ahead of itself. | Buy | |
| Sea Urchins | W W Jacobs | "Wapping Old Stairs?" | Buy | |
| Second Foundation | Isaac Asimov | There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considerably too dry for our purposes in any case. | Buy | |
| Second Generation | Howard Fast | Pete Lomas' mackerel drifter was an old, converted, coal-fired steam tug of a hundred and twenty-two tons, purchased as war surplus in 1919. | Buy | |
| Secrets | Danielle Steel | The sun reverberated off the buildings with the brilliance of a handful of diamonds cast against an iceberg, the shimmering white was blinding, as Sabina lay naked on a deck chair in the heat of the Los Angeles sun. She lay sparkling and oiled, warmed to a honey brown by the relentless sun. | Buy | |
| See, I Told You So | Rush H. Limbaugh, III | "So, Mr. Limbaugh . . . when do you hope to conquer America? And after you do, Mr. Limbaugh, just how oppressive will you be?" | Buy | |
| Semi-Tough | Dan Thomas B. Jenkins | I guess by now there can't be too many people anywhere who haven't heard about Billy Clyde Puckett, the humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football. | Buy | |
| Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. | Buy | Read |
| September | Rosamunde Pilcher | In early May, the summer came, at last, to Scotland. Winter had clung, with steely fingers, for far too long, refusing to relinquish its cruel grip. All through April, bitter winds had blown from the north-west, tearing the first blossom from the wild geynes, and burning brown the yellow trumpets of the early daffodils. Snow frosted the hilltops and lay deep in corries, and the farmers, despairing of fresh grazing, tractored the last of their feed out to the barren fields where lowing stock huddled in the shelter of the drystone walls. | Buy | |
| Septimius Felton | Nathaniel Hawthorne | It was a day in early spring; and as that sweet, genial time of year and atmosphere calls out tender greenness from the ground,--beautiful flowers, or leaves that look beautiful because so long unseen under the snow and decay,--so the pleasant air and warmth had called out three young people, who sat on a sunny hill-side enjoying the warm day and one another. | Buy | |
| Septimus | William John Locke | "I love Nunsmere," said the Literary Man from London. "It is a spot where faded lives are laid away in lavender." | Buy | |
| Sermons and Soda-Water | John O'Hara | I know of no quiet quite like that of a men's club at about half past nine on a summer Sunday evening. | Buy | |
| Sermons and Soda-Water | John O'Hara | To those who knew the bride and the groom, the marriage of Bobbie Hammersmith and Pete McCrea was the surprise of the year. | 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 | |
| Seven Days in May | Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II | The parking lot stretched away to the north, cheerless and vacant. Its monotonous acres of concrete were unbroken except where the occasional shadow of a maple tree speared thinly across the pavement. In the nearby lagoon that opened out into the Potomac, small craft lay in rows at their moorings as though glued to a mirror. No ripple disturbed the surface of the water where it reflected the early-morning sun that was now rising over the silent domes and roofs of Washington across the river. | Buy | |
| Seven Gothic Tales | Isak Dinesen | During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity. | Buy | |
| Seven Pillars of Wisdom | Thomas Edward Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") | Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. | 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 | |
| Shadow of a Tiger | Michael Collins | You never see a Chinese drunk. | 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 | |
| Shane | Jack Schaefer | He rode into our valley in the summer of '89. | Buy | |
| Shane | Jack Warner Schaefer | He rode into our valley in the summer of '89. | 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 | |
| Sharpe's Battle | Bernard Cornwell | Sharpe swore. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Company | Bernard Cornwell | A pale horse seen a mile away at sunrise means the night is over. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Devil | Bernard Cornwell | There were sixteen men and only twelve mules. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Enemy | Bernard Cornwell | On December 8th, 1812, the English soldiers first came to Adrados. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Gold | Bernard Cornwell | The war was lost; not finished, but lost. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Honour | Bernard Cornwell | There was a secret that would win the war for France. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Regiment | Bernard Cornwell | Regimental Sergeant Major MacLaird was a powerful man and the pressure of his fingers, where they gripped Major Richard Sharpe's left hand, was painful. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Revenge | Bernard Cornwell | Major Richard Sharpe had made every preparation for his own death. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Rifles | Bernard Cornwell | The prize was a strongbox. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Siege | Bernard Cornwell | It was ten days short of Candlemas, 1814, and an Atlantic wind carried shivers of cold rain that slapped on narrow cobbled alleys, spilt from the broken gutters of tangled roofs, and pitted the water of St Jean de Luz's inner harbour. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Sword | Bernard Cornwell | The tall man on horseback was a killer. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Tiger | Bernard Cornwell | It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England. | Buy | |
| Sharpe's Waterloo | Bernard Cornwell | It was dawn on the northern frontier of France; a border marked only by a shallow stream which ran between the stunted trunks of pollarded willows. | Buy | |
| She | H Rider Haggard | There are some events of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seem to be graven on the memory in such a fashion that we cannot forget them. | Buy | |
| She's Come Undone | Wally Lamb | In one of my earliest memories, my mother and I are on the front porch of our rented Carter Avenue house watching two delivery men carry our brand-new television set up the steps. I'm excited because I've heard about but never seen television. | Buy | |
| Shibumi | Trevanian | The screen flashed 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 ... then the projector was switched off, and the lights came up in recessed sconces along the walls of the private viewing room. | Buy | |
| Ship of Fools | Katherine Anne Porter | August, 1931 - The port town of Veracruz is a little purgatory between land and sea for the traveler, but the people who live there are very fond of themselves and the town they have helped to make. | Buy | |
| 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 | |
| Shogun | James Clavell | Blackthorne was suddenly awake. For a moment he thought he was dreaming because he was ashore and the room unbelievable. It was small and very clean and covered with soft mats. He was lying on a thick quilt and another was thrown over him. The ceiling was polished cedar and the walls were lathes of cedar, in squares, covered with an opaque paper that muted the light pleasantly. Beside him was a scarlet tray bearing small bowls. One contained cold cooked vegetables and he wolfed them, hardly noticing the piquant taste. Another contained a fish soup and he drained that. Another was filled with a thick porridge of wheat or barley and he finished it quickly, eating with his fingers. The water in an odd-shaped gourd was warm and tasted curious--slightly bitter but savory. | Buy | |
| Shoot | Douglas Fairbairn | This is what happened. | Buy | |
| Shoot To Kill | Wade Miller | He carried the evidence under his arm, thirty yellow pages bound into a green paper folder. | Buy | |
| Shosha | Isaac Bashevis Singer | I was brought up on three dead languages - Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish (some consider the last not a language at all) - and in a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud. | Buy | |
| Show Boat | Edna Ferber | Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse. | Buy | |
| Siddharta | Hermann Hesse | In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig trees, Siddharta, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda. | Buy | |
| Signal to Noise | Eric S Nylund | Jack watched his office walls sputter malfunctioning mathematical symbols and release a block of passenger pigeons; his nose was tickled with the odor of eucalyptus. | Buy | |
| Silas Marner | George Eliot | In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. | Buy | |
| 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 | |
| Silence--A Fable | Edgar Allan Poe | "Listen to me," said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. | Buy | |
| Silent Honor | Danielle Steel | Masao Takashimaya's family had searched for five years for a suitable bride for him, ever since his twenty-first birthday. But in spite of all their efforts to find a young woman who suited him, he rejected each of the girls as soon as he met them. | Buy | |
| Silent Night | Mary Higgins Clark | It was Christmas Eve in New York City. The cab slowly made its way down Fifth Avenue. It was nearly five o'clock. The traffic was heavy and the sidewalks were jammed with last-minute Christmas shoppers, homebound office workers, and tourists anxious to glimpse the elaborately trimmed store windows and the fabled Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. | Buy | |
| Silent Prey | John Sandford | A thought sparked in the chaos of Bekker's mind. | Buy | |
| Silent Thunder | Loren D Estleman | Ernest Krell loathed windows. | Buy | |
| Silverwing | Ken Oppel | Skimming over the banks of the stream, Shade heard the beetle warming up its wings. | Buy | |
| Simon Called Peter | Robert Keable | London lay as if washed with water-colour that Sunday morning, light blue sky and pale dancing sunlight wooing the begrimed stones of Westminster like a young girl with an old lover. | Buy | |
| Simon the Jester | William John Locke | I met Renniker the other day at the club. He is a man who knows everything--from the method of trimming a puppy's tail for a dog-show, without being disqualified, to the innermost workings of the mind of every European potentate. If I want information on any subject under heaven I ask Renniker. | Buy | |
| Sing Sing Nights | Harry Stephen Keeler | In the large, square death-cell a sudden peculiar quiet had fallen upon four men of different nationalities. | Buy | |
| Sir Mortimer | Mary Johnston | But if we return not from our adventure," ended Sir Mortimer, "if
the sea claims us, and upon his sandy floor, amid his Armida
gardens, the silver-singing mermaiden marvel at that wreckage
which was once a tall ship and at those bone which once were
animate,--if strange islands know our resting-place, sunk for
evermore in huge and most unkindly forests,--if, being but pawns
in a mighty game, we are lost or changed, happy, however, in that
the white hand of our Queen hath touched us, giving thereby consecration to our else unworthiness,--if we find no gold, nor take one ship of Spain, nor any city treasure-stored,--if we suffer a myriad sort of sorrows and at the last we perish miserably--" | Buy | |
| Sir Patrick Spens | Old Ballad | The king sits in Dunfermline town Drinking the blude-red wine. | 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 | |
| Six Chapters of a Man's Life | Victoria Cross | The charts were all spread out upon the table; the midnight gas burned steadily above my head; my pencil traced a dotted line down the paper under my hand. | Buy | |
| Skeleton Crew | Stephen King (used pseudonym Richard Bachman) | This is what happened. On the night the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke--the night of July 19--the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen. | Buy | |
| Sketches by Boz | Charles Dickens | How much is conveyed in those two short words - "The Parish!" | Buy | |
| Sketches of Young Couples | Charles Dickens | There is to be a wedding this morning at the corner house in the terrace. | 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 | |
| Skipping Christmas | John Grisham | The gate was packed with weary travelers, most of them standing and huddled along the walls because the meager allotment of plastic chairs had long since been taken. Every plane that came and went held at least eighty passengers, yet the gate had seats for only a few dozen. | Buy | |
| Slapstick | Kurt Vonnegut | To whom it may concern: It is springtime. | Buy | |
| Slapstick: or, Lonesome No More! | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon. | Buy | |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | All this happened, more or less. | Buy | |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut Jr | All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. | Buy | |
| Slayground | Richard Stark | Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and the packet of explosive in the other. | Buy | |
| Sleep Till Noon | Max Shulman | Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life . . . But first let me tell you a little about myself. My name is Harry Riddle, and I am a sensitive, retiring person. | Buy | |
| Sleeping Murder | Agatha Christie | Gwenda Reed stood, shivering a little, on the quayside. The docks and the custom sheds and all of England that she could see were gently waving up and down. And it was in that moment that she made her decision--the decision that was to lead to such very momentous events. | Buy | |
| Sleeping with Schubert | Bonnie Marson | The day I became a genius I locked the keys in the car with the motor running. | Buy | |
| Sloop of War | Alexander Kent | It was a little more than a hundred yards' walk from the busy foreshore to the elegant white building at the top of the coast road, but within a minute of leaving the launch Richard Bolitho was damp with sweat. | Buy | |
| Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend | Robert James Waller | The Trivandrum Mail was on time. It came out of the jungle and pounded into Villupuram Junction at 3:18 on a sweltry afternoon in south India. When the whistle first sounded far and deep in the countryside, people began pressing toward the edge of the station platform. | Buy | |
| Small Change | Marge Piercy | Beth was looking in the mirror of her mother's vanity. | Buy | |
| Small World | David Lodge | "April is the cruellest month", Persee McGarrigle quoted silently to himself, gazing through the grimy windowpanes at the unseasonable snow crusting the lawns and flowerbeds of the Rummidge campus. | Buy | |
| Smiley's People | John Le Carre | Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Miley from his dubious retirement. | Buy | |
| Smilla's Sense of Snow | Peter Høeg | It's freezing - an extraordinary 0º fahrenheit - and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine the snow is qanik - big almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost. | Buy | |
| 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 | |
| Smoke Bellew | Jack London | In the beginning he was Christopher Bellew. By the time he was at college he had become Chris Bellew. Later, in the Bohemian crowd of San Francisco, he was called Kit Bellew. And in the end he has known by other name than Smoke Bellew. | Buy | |
| Snow Falling on Cedars | David Guterson | The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendents table - the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial. | Buy | |
| So Big | Edna Ferber | Until her was almost ten the name stuck to him. | Buy | |
| So Disdained | Nevil Shute (Nevil Shute Norway) | As I have said, this matter started in the night. | Buy | |
| So Little Time | John Phillips Marquand | In the mornings when they were in the city, they had breakfast on a card table in Jeffrey's study. | Buy | |
| So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish | Douglas Adams | Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. | Buy | |
| So Red the Rose | Stark Young | "Whereas, the Creator," Malcolm Bedford wrote, "has seen fit to remove from the earthly scene our beloved friend, Hugh McGehee, and, whereas, Zachary Taylor, President of the United States of America, stated that Edward McGehee of Woodville, brother of the deceased, was the best man he ever knew, making him, furthermore, executor of his estate, it is the opinion here that the virtues of said Hugh McGehee were no less great." | Buy | |
| So Well Remembered | James Hilton | That day so well remembered--a day, indeed, impossible to forget--was the first of September, 1921; on the morning of which George Boswell--then only Councillor Boswell, then sandy-brown-haired with not a trace of gray--woke before dawn, looked at his watch, and promptly slept again till Annie brought in the morning paper, a cup of tea, and some letters that had just arrived. | Buy | |
| Soldier's Pay | William Faulkner | Lowe, Julian, number, -----, late a Flying Cadet, Umptieth Squadron, Air Service, known as "One Wing" by the other embryonic aces of his flight, regarded the world with a yellow and disgruntled eye. | Buy | |
| Soldiers of Fortune | Richard Harding Davis | "It is so good of you to come early," said Mrs. Porter, as Alice Langham entered the drawing-room. "I want to ask a favor of you. I'm sure you won't mind. I would ask one of the debutantes, except that they're always so cross if one puts them next to men they don't know and who can't help them, and so I thought I'd just ask you, you're so good-natured. You don't mind, do you?" | Buy | |
| Soldiers Three | Rudyard Kipling | Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd are Privates in B Company of a Line Regiment, and personal friends of mine. Collectively I think, but I am not certain, they are the worst me in the regiment so far as genial black guardism goes. | Buy | |
| Somebody's Luggage | Charles Dickens | The writer of these humble lines being a Waiter, and having come of a family of Waiters, and owning at the present time five brothers who are all Waiters, and likewise an only sister who is a Waitress, would wish to offer a few words respecting his calling; first having the pleasure of hereby in a friendly manner offering the Dedication of the same unto Joseph, much respected Head Waiter at the Shamjam Coffeehouse, London, E.C., than which an individual more eminently deserving of the name of man, or a more amenable honour to be his own head and heart, whether consideredin the light of a Waiter or regarded as a human being, do not exist. | Buy | |
| Someplace to Be Flying | Charles de Lint | Newford, Late August 1996 The streets were still wet but the storm clouds had moved on as Hank drove south on Yoors waiting for a fare. Inhabited tenements were on his right, the derelict blight of the Tombs on his left, Miles Davis's muted trumpet snaking around Wayne Shorter's sax on the tape deck. The old Chev four-door didn't look like much; painted a flat gray, it blended into the shadows like the ghost car it was. | Buy | |
| Something Happened | Joseph Heller | I get the willies when I see closed doors. | Buy | |
| Something Happened | Joseph Heller | I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I
am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes
enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening
behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I
am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or
just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster
mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted
glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out
strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime. | Buy | |
| Something of Value | Robert Chester Ruark | Peter McKenzie stripped off his faded shorts and his green drill shirt and reached for a bowl of ocher mud which had been softened to a pliant paste with water. He smeared the mud over his face, neck, and shoulders, until his sunburned skin was dyed a deep coppery red. | Buy | |
| Something Wicked this Way Comes | Ray Bradbury | First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. | Buy | |
| Sometimes a Great Notion | Ken Kesey | Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . . | Buy | |
| Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | The North Carolina Mutual life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock. | Buy | |
| Sonia: Between Two Worlds | Stephen McKenna | At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic. When I made his acquaintance some thirty years later he had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. | Buy | |
| Sons | Pearl S. Buck | Wang Lung lay dying. | Buy | |
| Sons and Lovers | D H Lawrence | "The Bottoms" succeed to "Hell Row." Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brook-side on Greenhill Lane. | Buy | |
| Sophie's Choice | William Styron | In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. | Buy | |
| Sorrell and Son | George Warwick Deeping | Sorrell was trying to fasten the straps of the little brown portmanteau, but since the portmanteau was old and also very full, he had to deal with it tenderly. | Buy | |
| Sounder | William H Armstrong | The tall man stood at the edge of the porch. The roof sagged from the two rough posts which held it, almost closing the gap between his head and the rafters. The dim light from the cabin window cast long equal shadows from man and posts. A boy stood nearby shivering in the cold October wind. He ran his fingers back and forth over the broad crown of the head of a coon dog named Sounder. | Buy | |
| Soundings | Arthur Hamilton Gibbs | It was half-past five in the morning. The village was stretching itself. Thin spirals of blue smoke began to creep out of the first chimney, then another. From inside cow byres came the subdued rattle of chains and the swish of cows being milked. One by one the animals came out into the dewy paddocks with that peculiar low mumble as though grumbling to themselves. | Buy | |
| Southern Mail | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out. And then night fell. | 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 | |
| Sparkenbroke | Charles Morgan | Since the death of Lord Sparkenbroke, tourists from Chelmouth who would formerly have been content to wander through the corridors of his great house, gazing at its treasures and listening to the mechanical chatter of the guides, have added the church and the churchyard to their pilgrimage, for in the churchyard stands the Sparkenbroke Mound, an open, grassy sepulchre of a type familiar in Wales but rare so far east as Dorset, and through its iron-barred gate Lord Sparkenbroke's coffin may be seen among those of his ancestors. | Buy | |
| Spartina | John Dudley Casey | Dick Pierce swung the bait barrel off his wharf into his work skiff. | Buy | |
| Speak Now | Frank Yerby | "Now you," the policeman said. "Documents!" | Buy | |
| Special Delivery | Danielle Steel | The tires of the red Ferrari squealed, as it came around the corner and dove neatly into the space where Jack Watson always parked it. It was in the parking lot of his Beverly Hills store, Julie's. | Buy | |
| St. Ives | Robert Louis Stevenson | It was in the month of May, 1813, that I was so unlucky as to fall into the hands of the enemy. | Buy | |
| Stairwell Justice | Jay Brandon | "Motion to have the jury killed, Your Honor." "Come now, counsel," said kindly old Judge Burr, leaning down from the bench. "That seems a little radical, doesn't it?" | Buy | |
| Stand Into Danger | Alexander Kent | Richard Bolitho thrust some coins into the hand of the man who had carried his sea-chest to the jetty and shivered in the damp air. | Buy | |
| Stand on Zanzibar | John Brunner | Stock cue SOUND: "Presenting SCANALYZER, Engrelay Satelserv's unique thrice-per-day study of the big big scene, the INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface between you and your world!" | Buy | |
| Star | Danielle Steel | The birds were already calling to each other in the early morning stillness of the Alexander Valley as the sun rose slowly over the hills, stretching golden fingers into a sky that within moments almost purple. The leaves on the trees rustled gently in the barest breeze as Crystal stood silent in the damp grass, watching the brilliant sky explode in shimmering colors. For brief moments, the birds stopped singing, almost as though they, too, were in awe of the valleys beauty. | Buy | |
| Star Money | Kathleen Winsor | It was a woman's bedroom, actually a boudoir, and no man belonged in it except by invitation. | Buy | |
| Star Wars: Attack of the Clones | R.A. Salvatore (Robert Anthony Salvatore) | Shmi Skywalker Lars stood on the edge of the sand berm marking the perimeter of the moisture farm, one leg up higher, to the very top of the ridge, knee bent. | Buy | |
| Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace | Terry Brooks | Tatooine. The suns burned down out of a cloudless blue sky, washing the vast desert wastes of the planet in brilliant white light. The resultant glare rose off the flat, sandy surface in a wet shimmer of blistering heat to fill the gaps between the massive cliff faces and solitary outcroppings of the mountains that were the planet's sole distinguishing feature. Sharply etched, the monoliths stood like sentinels keeping watch in a watery haze. | Buy | |
| Starplex | Robert J Sawyer | There would be hell to pay. | Buy | |
| Stars on the Sea | F van Wyck Mason | The clouds darkening Boston Harbor looked so low and ghostlike Sergeant Timothy Bennett guessed snow would soon begin falling. In fact, the jumbled dark roofs and church spires of distant Cambridge were already graying out of sight. | Buy | |
| Starship Troopers | Robert A. Heinlein | I always get the shakes before a drop. | 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 | |
| Steamboat Gothic | Frances Parkinson Keyes | As usual, dinner at Cindy Lou had been a rich repast, and conducive to pleasant somnolence. | Buy | |
| Steamboat Gothic | Frances Parkinson Keyes | The day was warm for March, and the stranger, who had been walking for nearly half an hour along the river road, took a fine embroidered handkerchief from the tail pocket of his burgundy-colored frock coat and mopped his face with it. Then he flicked the handkerchief lightly over his tight-fitting mouse-gray trousers and his shining congress boots. He had no mind to reach his destination dripping with sweat or powdered with dust. | Buy | |
| Steel Beach | John Varley | "In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman. | 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 | |
| Steppenwolf | Hermann Hesse | The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. | Buy | |
| Steps | Jerzy Kosinski | I was traveling farther south. The villages were small and poor; each time I stopped in one, a crowd gathered around my car and the children followed my every move. | Buy | |
| Still Life with Woodpecker | Tom Robbins | In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting - with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui - for something momentous to occur. | Buy | |
| Still Life With Woodpecker | Harold Robbins (originally Francis Kane) | In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui--for something momentous to occur. | Buy | |
| Stones From The River | Ursula Hegi | As a child Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside of others | Buy | |
| Storm Below | Hugh Garner | The dawn of March 9th, 1943 rose above the spinning earth. | Buy | |
| Storm Warning | Jack Higgins | As Prager turned the corner, thunder rumbled far out to sea and lightning flashed across the sky, giving for one brief moment a clear view of the harbor. The usual assortment of small craft and three or four coastal steamers were moored at the main jetty. The Deutschland was anchored in midstream, distinctive if only for the fact that she was the one sailing ship in the harbor. | Buy | |
| 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 | |
| Strange Fruit | Lillian Smith | She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate. | Buy | |
| Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert A. Heinlein | Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. | Buy | |
| Strangers and Brothers | Charles Percy Snow | The fire in our habitual public-house spurted and fell. | 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 | |
| Success to the Brave | Alexander Kent | Richard Bolitho leaned his palms on the sill of an open window and stared across the courtyard to the far wall and the sea beyond. | Buy | |
| Sudden Prey | James Sandford (pseudonym of John Camp) | Through the speakers above his head, little children sang in sweet voices, O holy night, the stars are brightly shining, it is the night of the dear Savior's birth . . . | Buy | |
| Sugar Street | Naguib Mahfouz | Their heads were huddled around the brazier, and their hands were spread over its fire: Amina's thin and gaunt, Aisha's stiff, and Umm Hanafi's like the shell of a turtle. | Buy | |
| Sula | Toni Morrison | In that place, where they tore the night shade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. | Buy | |
| Summer Sisters | Judy Blume | Victoria's world shook for the first time on the day Caitlin Somers sashayed up to her desk, plunked herself down on the edge, and said, "Vix . . ." It came out sounding like the name of a beautiful flower, velvety and smooth, not like a decongestant. | Buy | |
| Sunday under Three Heads | Charles Dickens | There are few things from which I derive greater pleasure, than walking through some of the principal streets of London on a fine Sunday, in summer, and watching the cheerful faces of the lively groups with which they are thronged. | Buy | |
| Sunset | Douglas Reeman | The khaki staff car rolled to a halt, and after some hesitation the Royal Marine driver offered, "No boat there yet, sir". | Buy | |
| Sunset Limited | James Lee Burke | I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earler outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny mails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall. | Buy | |
| Sunshine Enemies | KC Constantine | The man with the clerical collar tottered bowlegged under the weight of his cargo into Balzic's office. | Buy | |
| Sunwing | Ken Oppel | Wings trimmed tight, Shade sailed through the forest. | Buy | |
| Suspense | Joseph Conrad | A deep red glow flushed the fronts of marble palaces piled up on the slope of an arid mountain whose barren ridge traced high on the darkening sky a ghostly and glimmering outline. | Buy | |
| Suttree | Cormac McCarthy | Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you. | Buy | |
| Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas | James B. Patterson | Kate Wilkinson sat in warm bathwater in the weird but wonderful old-fashioned porcelain tub in her New York apartment. The apartment exuded "old" and "worn" in ways that practitioners of shabby chic couldn't begin to imagine. | Buy | |
| Swan Song | John Galsworthy | In modern Society, one thing after another, this spice on that, ensures a kind of memoristic vacuum, and Fleur Mont's passage of arms with Majorie Ferrar was, by the spring of 1926, well-nigh forgotten. | Buy | |
| Swann's Way | Marcel Proust | The Captive: At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big window-curtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like. The Fugitive: "Mademoiselle Albertine is gone!" | Buy | |
| Sweet Dreams | Michael Frayn | A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green. | 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 | |
| Sweet Women Lie | Loren D Estleman | The Club Canaveral's rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building. | 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 | |
| Swords in the Mist | Fritz Leiber | Muffled drums beat out a nerve-scratching rhythm and red lights flickered hypnotically in the underground Temple of Hates, where five thousand ragged worshippers knelt and abased themselves and ecstatically pressed foreheads against the cold and gritty cobbles as the trance took hold and the human venom rose in them. | Buy | |
| Sybil, or The Two Nations | Benjamin Disraeli | "I'll take the odds against Caravan." | Buy |