“On May 18, 1860, the day when the Republican Party would nominate its candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln was up early.”
– Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Horrorshow! 
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. (Movie) 
Want to hear a ghost story? That’s good. I know a few.
“This is a cookbook for dolls. It is written for kind climates and summertime.”
I know. It’s the first two.
“When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king.”
Quest for a Maid, by Frances Mary Hendry
“Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.” (The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary.” (Call for the Dead, John le Carré)
"August 1933, a summer’s day in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.” (from the introduction to Ghostland, Colin Dickey)
“Captain, Mister Grafton is attempting to put a man ashore, sir.”
Fragment, by Warren Fahy.
The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a single image: that of the Sailor in the Tarot deck from which the man in black had dealt (or purported to deal) the gunslinger’s own moaning future.
“I remember how good the weather was that September.” from The One From the Other by Philip Kerr
“When, on Christmas Day, AD 800, Pope Leo III lowered the imperial crown on to the head of Charles, son of Pepin the Frank, and prostrated himself before him as Emperor of Rome, the Empire of Byzantium had been in existence for 470 years.” from Byzantium (vol. II) - The Apogee by John Julius Norwich (With sentences like that it’s no wonder he filled three volumes)
“On May 25th Arthur Surbonadier, whose real name was Arthur Simes, went to visit his uncle, Jacob Saint, whose real name was Jacob Simes.” from Enter A Murderer by Ngaio Marsh
“i am sam. I am sam. Sam i am.”
“My dear friend Roz Horowitz met her new husband online dating, and Roz is three years older and 50 pounds heavier than I am, and people have said that is generally not as well-preserved, and so I thought I would try it even though I avoid going online too much.”
Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin
“This book begins with a plane crash.”
Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray.
“Before she became the Girl From Nowhere – the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years – she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy.” – The Passage, Justin Cronin
(If you’ve read all three, should I get the other two books in the trilogy? I’m enjoying this one so far but haven’t gotten that far into it.)
“You’re walking home late one night when two men leap out of the shadows, pull a hood over your head, and shove you into a van.”
Troubleshooting Your Novel: Essential Techniques for Identifying and Solving Manuscript Problems, by Steven James.
“Wow, you could kill someone with that thing!”
Gone Gull, the latest Meg Langslow mystery by Donna Andrews.
“All right, let’s put our backs to it,” said Stephen Hamilton, as the barge carrying the rest of the escapees from the Tower of London began to pull away downriver, Harry Lefferts waving over the tern.
1635: A Parcel of Rogues, by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis.
Many years ago I was expounding at length on some topic to my young son, who sat patiently for a while and then said, “Yes, dad, but how does it connect?”
By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia, by Barry Cunliffe.
“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.”
There Autobiography of Malcom X, as told to Alex Haley
“Send up another, damn you, send them all up, at once if you have to!” Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik
(Actually, that’s the first spoken sentence; the rest goes on for several more lines."
“They’re out there.”
“Turf history is emblazoned with the great names that have adorned it–Man o’ War, Colin, Sysonby, Exterminator, Count Fleet–but a little applause should be reserved for those not so richly endowed by nature who yet performed splendidly.”
A Touch of Greatness, by C. W. Anderson.