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

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

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.

To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.

For thousands of years all kinds of people have been crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the old countries to the new world. And more often than not, they took their gods with them. And as it turns out, America is not a good place for gods.

All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary.

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue.

They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.

Nothing in this book is true.

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.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

It was a pleasure to burn.

The stains of rust seemed to map blood seas on the black, pocked surface of Mock's Vane.

They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.

Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

A screaming comes across the sky.

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.

The assassin came in and ordered waffles.

This is not for you.

In the land of Ingary where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of the three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when the sunset came, and sometimes they were in the street before he could get back.

I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.

Riding the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.

Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done.

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

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.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.

Call me Ishmael.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.

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

Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.

It was starting to end, after what seemed most of an eternity to me.

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

As summer wheat came ripe,
so did I,
born at home, on the kitchen floor.

The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;

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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

All children except one grow up.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

He was born with a gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad.

To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

All this happened, more or less.

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.

Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.

I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,
first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to
Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea,
by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger,
long suffering also in war, until he founded a city
and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people
came, the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome.
Muse, tell me the cause: how was she offended in her divinity,
how was she grieved, the Queen of Heaven, to drive a man,
noted for virtue, to endure such dangers, to face so many
trials? Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods? 

If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn’t give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
    from the straight road and woke to find myself
    alone in a dark wood.

Once there was a tree...and she loved a little boy.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

It was time to whip the god.

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 Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

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.

Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.

RAGE: 
            Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
    Begin with the clash between Agamemnon—
The Greek warlord—and godlike Achilles.

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. About anything.

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.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth the effort.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”

At the far end of town
where the Grickle-grass grows
and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows
and no birds ever sing excepting old crows...
is the street of the Lifted Lorax. 

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

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 until the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

The small boys came early to the hanging.

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."

He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east.

The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage, I could have said, but why ruin everything right now?

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

In every club there is a club bore. The Coronation Club was no exception; and the fact that an Air Raid was in progress made no difference to normal procedure.

The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

We’re going to tell you about three of the children in Mrs. Jewls’s class, on the thirtieth story of Wayside School. But before we get to them, there is something you ought to know. Wayside School was accidentally built sideways. It was supposed to be only one story high, with thirty classrooms all in a row. Instead, it is thirty stories high, with one classroom on each story. The builder said he was very sorry.

I woke up with a cat and a dead man. I knew the cat.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

Squire Trelawnay, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-- and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.