I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The wind came across the bay like something living.
Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
“A dog walks up to the guard post with half its face stuck full of porcupine quills.”
The Militia House, by John Milas
“Welcome to my double life.”
I Brake for Yard Sales and Flea Markets, Thrift Shops, Auctions, and the Occasional Dumpster, by Lara Spencer
Zoya, Natalya and Pip had already settled with their breakfasts by the time I hit the hotel dining room.
Working Class (SC Marva Collins Book 2) - Nathan Lowell
“Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain—”
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
“By the first Sabbath after the festival of Simchat Torah, Rav Krushka had grown so thin and pale that, the congregation muttered, the next world could be seen in the hollows of his eyes.”
Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman
“The full-length mirror in the lobby, there to lend a sense of light and space to the cramped entrance hall, is spotted with age, the corrosive grime picking at the silvering like a scab.”
Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten
“Aah, here comes Andrew Bell.”
All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia, by Simon Garfield.
‘But please! You must know me! Oh, why won’t you help me?’
“Hotel Splendide”, the first story in The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions, by Kerry Greenwood
“By reason of the prolonged cold, which lingered far into April and had scarcely mellowed when the month of May began, everything came laggard and reluctant that spring of 1142.”
The Rose Rent, by Ellis Peters.
Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey.
“This is a work of fiction”
“Gabriela Rose was standing in a small clearing that led to a rope-and-board footbridge.”
The Recovery Agent: A Novel by Janet Evanovich.
“Who was V. M. Straka?”
Ship of Theseus by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst ( I used the first printed line in the Foreword, not the “handwritten” marginalia earlier)
and
“The red-headed girl sank into the seat in the middle of the first row with a gasp of relief.”
The Bellamy Trial by Frances Noyes Hart
You know, I love the Cafael books and could tell right away that was one of his. The abbey was worried that the rosebush might not bloom in time, right?
That was a concern, yes. (Not a spoiler, since that’s on the back cover.)
“The Martin House is a superlative work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie period.”
Martin House: Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect (no author given)
“On December 7, 1941, marine biologist Mary Sears, working in the warm waters off the western coast of South America in Pisco Bay, unfurled her plankton net from the back of the trawler Don Jaime and tossed it back into the swirl of an open sea.”
Lethal Tides: Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II, by Catherine Musemeche.
“The yacht appeared nine weeks after Israel returned to his father’s house, and even from a distance and under the squeezed red sun of dawn, he could see that the vessel was in trouble.”
An Honest Man, Michael Koryta
“She didn’t know she had died.”
Vacuum Flowers, by Michael Swanwick.