I’m aware of that… we had the book lying about the house when I was younger. Never did read it in its entirety, though… it disappeared one day 'fore I was done. A tragedy.
Another…
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
-Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
“Pour longtemps je me coucher a bonne heure”
(For a long time I used to go to bed early)
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
“You pigs git!”
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
“All men desire by nature to know”
Aristotle, The Metapyhsics
Just as he pulled himself up to the rock-ledge, he heard a sudden rattle, and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand; turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing.
George R Stewart, Earth Abides
It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile.
Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
At about nine o’clock in the morning at the end of November, during a thaw, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Here is an on-line literary test of famous book opening lines for anyone who is interested.
Go on, test your knowledge.
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
“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.”
The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
“Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears - his satellite dish to the stars - and foretold my widowhood and exile.”
Jasmine Bharati Mukherjee
“There was a wall.”
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
"‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry."
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (obviously)
JFTR: strong disagreement with what a poster says is OK in any forum, but scathing remarks about a poster are strictly Pit material.
Pathetic.
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were doing;–that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humors and dispositions which were then uppermost:–had they duly wieghed and considered all this and proceeded accordingly,–I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.”
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
“He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances.” Voyager, Diana Gabaldon.
“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms as the Tarleton twins were.” (You should know that one.)
(Date) was Meggie Cleary’s fourth birthday." The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullogh
Possible paraphrase from memory:
“If there’s one thing I hate,” I said to the beautiful woman on the airplane, “it’s meeting a beautiful woman on an airplane.”
Kinky Friedman - The Mile-High Club
No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. … Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
Depending on where you think the story starts, either
It is said that fifty-three years after his liberation he returned from the Golden Cloud, to take up once again the gauntlet of Heaven, to oppose the Order of Life and the gods who ordained it so. His followers had prayed for his return, though their prayers were sin. Prayer should not trouble one who has gone on to Nirvana, no matter what the circumstances of his going. The wearers of the saffron robe prayed, however, that He of the Sword, Manjusri, should come again among them. The Boddhisatva is said to have heard…
or
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. he preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstnces being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
Moderator’s Notes
j_kat_251 you would do well to keep the insults out of this forum.
Thank you.
I am the Vampire Lestat. I’m immortal. More or less.
~Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had bourne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.
~Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
~Frank Herbert, Dune
You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.
~Alice Walker, The Color Purple
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
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
All this happened, more or less.
~Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true excess, not the somber reknown of waning staesmen and chinless kings.
Don DeLillo
Great Jones Street
I like that Douglas Adams quote above.
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” – A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving.
AFAIK, the “blue screen of death” doesn’t have anything to do with the TV itself. I bet if you disconnect the cable and vcr/dvd, and turn to a channel you don’t have, you’ll get plain old black and white static, since I know my tv only blue screens when it’s attached to something else. YMMV
I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through which they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.
-Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis
First post! 
The original:
“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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)