The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. - Murphy, Samuel Beckett
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” - The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
The moment one learns English, complications set in. Chromos, Felipe Alfau
It was the day my grandmother exploded. The Crow Road, Iain M. Banks
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. - Tracks, Louise Erdrich
It was a pleasure to burn. - Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. - Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? - Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Back When We Were Grownups, Anne Tyler
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. - The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G. K. Chesterton
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” - The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. - The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley
“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” - Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. - Middle Passage, Charles Johnson
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. - Scaramouche, Raphael Sabatini
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. - Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
