For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.
—Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle (2009)
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.
—Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
—J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue.
—Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole (2008)
If you’re going to read this, don’t bother.
—Chuck Palahniuk, Choke (2001)
and it’s a story that might bore you but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or, actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.
—Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction (1987)
Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.
—Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)
The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long.
—Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)
In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
—Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)
In the morning Cathy McPherson put three soft-boiled eggs outside Benny Catchprice’s door and in the afternoon she fired him from the Spare Parts Department.
—Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector (1991)
People called me Driver
—Eric Jerome Dickey, Drive Me Crazy (2004)
For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.
—J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)
My name is Bruno Dante and what I'm writing about here is what happened.
—Dan Fante, Chump Change (1998)
A fucking cosmic shit shower.
—Dan Fante, 86’d: A Novel (2009)
Like a match struck in a darkened room: Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.
—Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train...
—William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
—Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
They shoot the white girl first.
—Toni Morrison, Paradise (1997)
“Get away from here, you dirty swine,” she said.
—Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
Time seems to pass.
—Don Delillo, The Body Artist (2001)
The sands never rested.
—Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes (1962)
The day was warm and golden, the garden was full of the scent of flowers.
—D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
The cell was dark, and the voice was low.
—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)
I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of an ambulance having to take me away in the Night.
—Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
The Signora had no business to do it.
—E. M Forster, A Room with a View (1908)
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
—John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937)
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.
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Marsh is not swamp.
—Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.
—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2003)
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.
—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
—Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013)
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
—Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001)
It was long ago, when the gods were still mortal.
—Olga Tokarczuk, Anna In in the Tombs of the World (2006)
I am a box man.
—Kōbō Abe, The Box Man (1973)
It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.
—Don Delillo, Falling Man (2007)
On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.
—George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
This book contains the records left us by a man whom, according to the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf.
—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
At dusk they pour from the sky.
—Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014)
The trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all.
—Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (2015)
It is cold in the scriptorium.
—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980)
What makes a life—self or circumstance?
—Christopher Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020)
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.
—Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)
Everybody wants to own the end of the world.
—Don Delillo, Zero K (2016)
Here they come, marching into American sunlight.
—Don Delillo, Mao II (1991)
Fame requires every kind of excess.
—Don Delillo, Great Jones Street (1973)
When I first bought this hole, it was intended as a secret hideaway, but as I gradually got to know the place better, I realized it was too vast.
—Kōbō Abe, The Ark Sakura (1984)
First there was nothing.
—Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
My name is Kathy H.
—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (1993)
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
—Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
They’re out there.
—Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.
—Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
It was a pleasure to burn.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.
—Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (1985)
Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.
—Walter Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit (1983)
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.
—Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993)
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
—Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996)
At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds.
—Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1967)
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
—Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
—Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (1915)
The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.
—Ronald Hugh Morrieson, The Scarecrow (1963)
For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth.
—Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (1949)
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
A screaming comes across the sky.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing.
—Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner (1881)
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.
—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
—William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty–four days now without taking a fish.
—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Call me Jonah.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (1963)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1938)
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
This was a time of trouble for Benson, when he felt silence forming over him like a crust, when he couldn’t work and couldn’t sleep and spent a lot of time walking around the city in an ancient overcoat of grey tweed, talking to strangers, looking for signs, portents, auguries.
—Barry Unsworth, Sugar and Rum (1988)
The moment one learns English, complications set in.
—Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.
—Don Delillo, Underworld (1997)
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
—Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o’clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (1869)
Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.
—Don Delillo, Americana (1971)
It was love at first sight.
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
124 was spiteful.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
—Jane Austen, Emma (1815)
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.
—John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1922)
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1867)
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.
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
Here’s how it started.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1934)
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1886)
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1964)
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.
—Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero (1985)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
—George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
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.
—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
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.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
All this happened, more or less.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.
—Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, The Outsider (1942)
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
—James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
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.
—Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
One day in August a man disappeared.
—Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes (1962)
The day had gone by just as days go by.
—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
Call me Ishmael.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
The day broke gray and dull.
—W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
—William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
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.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
When once sordid interest seizes on the heart, it freezes up the source of every warm and liberal feeling; it is an enemy alike to virtue and to taste—this it perverts, and that it annihilates.
—Anne Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1796)
To Athené then.
—Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966)
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