…are belong to us.
“What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”
Arthur C Clarke, The Star
“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 & Prejudice
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Its final lines are great too:
“The Ramans did everything in threes.”
From Rendevouz With Rama.
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” – last lines, On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
“This is my favorite book in all the world, although I have never read it.”
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
**It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. **
1984 George Orwell.
And so we will all be together.
- Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
One day, Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could make anything starting with the letter ‘n.’
- Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
“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, if you want to know the truth.”
First line of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”
“I loved Big Brother” is fracking jolly, too, although you kind of need to know the story for it to work.
I assume that’s a reference to the final line. I thought it was “He loved Big Brother”.
“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. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, “Keep to-morrow dark,” and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.”
G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“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
Meyer and McGee were about to call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.
Darker Than Amber, John D. MacDonald
And the best opening paragraph, ever:
You are correct.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
“It’s a cookbook.” --Damon Knight, To Serve Man.
It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was. The Picture of Dorian Gray
One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair. A Rose for Emily
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. Emma
“If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop-room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.”
— Last line of Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography, The Words