"You better not never tell nobody but God."

The Color Purple
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

Charlotte's Web
"What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask."

Play It as It Lays
"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

Mrs. Dalloway
"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."

Jane Eyre
"My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call."

The Prince of Tides
“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
"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

The Secret History
"Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable."

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit
"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
"It was a dark and stormy night."

A Wrinkle in Time
"It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984
“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions..."

Invisible Cities
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer
"A screaming came across the sky."

Gravity's Rainbow
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
