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; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. – George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. – Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
It was the day my grandmother exploded. – Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroitday 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)
You better not never tell nobody but God. – Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
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)
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. – David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. – StanleyElkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. – Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. – Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. – Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. – David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
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