A Wond'rous World Where I'd Like To Be

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• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen, 1813
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

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• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens, 1859
• Call me Ishmael. Moby Dick – Herman Melville, 1850
• If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger, 1951
• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. The Great Gatsby – F Sott Fitzgerald, 1925
• Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Rebecca – Daphne De Maurier, 1938
• What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Love Story – Erich Segal, 1970
• As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka, 1916

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• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy, 1873-7
• The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologising for our families. The Last of the Savages – Jay McInerney, 1996
• The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The Go-Between – LP Hartley, 1953
• 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. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens, 1850
• Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967
• It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Paul Clifford – Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1830
• When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. The Last Good Kiss – James Crumley, 1978
• For my 90th birthday I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin. A Memoir of My Sad Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marques, 2004

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• Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others. Kiss of the Spider Woman – Manuel Puig, 1976
• I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen (Karin Blixen), 1937
• In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. A River Runs Through it – Norman Maclean, 1989
• All children, except one, grow up. Peter Pan – JM Barrie, 1911
• I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte, 1847
• In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien, 1937
• The day the men disappeared started as a typical Sunday morning in Mariquita: the roosters forgot to announce dawn, the sexton overslept, the church bell didn’t summon the faithful to attend the early service, and (as on every Sunday for the past ten years) only one person showed up for six o’clock mass: Doña Victoria viuda de Morales, the Morales widow. Tales From the Town of Widows & Chronicles From the Land of Men – James Cañón, 2007
• “Take my camel, dear,” said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The Towers of Trebizond – Rose MacAulay, 1956

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• It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marques, 1985
• To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck, 1939
• Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – DH Lawrence, 1928
• We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge. Darker Than Amber – John D MacDonald, 1966
• My brother Ward was once a famous man. The Paperboy – Pete Dexter, 1995
• Let me say this: bein a idiot is no box of chocolates. Forrest Gump – Winston Groom, 1986
• It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. Earthly Powers – Anthony Burgess, 1980
• They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hills in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. Child of God – Cormac McCarthy, 1973
• The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. The Gunslinger – Stephen King, 1982
• The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Neuromancer -William Gibson, 1984

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• If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint – Brady Udall, 2001
• You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. If on a winter’s night a traveller – ItaloCalvino, 1979
• I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne, 1759–1767
• There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. Cry the Beloved Country – Alan Paton, 1948
• You better not never tell nobody but God. The Color Purple – Alice Walker, 1982
• Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck, 1939

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• For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in the first place. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881 (Tr. Gregory Rabassa, 1997)
• I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. Second Skin – John Hawkes, 1964
• We are each the love of someone’s life. The Confessions of Max Tivoli – Andrew Sean Greer, 2004
• “Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,” said Jagan to his listener, who asked, “Why conquer the self?” Jagan said, “I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.” The Vendor of Sweets – RK Narajan, 1967
• They shoot the white girl first. Paradise – Toni Morrison, 1997
• 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. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain, 1884
• Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. Alphabetical Africa – Walter Abish, 1974
• My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold, 2002
• The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows – JK Rowling, 2007

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