Another Multiverse line from the Discworld:
“It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it” (Raising Steam)
At 2:50 a.m. on Friday, September 1, 1939, a telephone rang in a darkened bedroom on the second floor of the White House.
Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World by Michael Fullilove
I feel “Thank you for coming.” gets into the spirit of a guide to sex and manners.
As soon as the door opened he knew he was dead.
John Katzenbach, “What Comes Next”
My earlier post was from the book I’m reading at work. Here’s the first line of the one I’m reading at home:
*
“In Big Bend National Park, the Rio Grande is so low because of drought, locals are calling it the Rio Sand”.*
–The Hour Of The Land by Terry Tempest Williams
“Quaraqua.”
-Jack McDevitt, The Engines of God
*Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy *by Steven Campbell
“I am Ivan.”
From The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate.
“THE SECRET Service holds much that is kept secret even from very senior officers in the organization. ”
Just completed my third or fourth rereading of The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming. Actually a little better than I remembered.
“Bon Agornin writhed on his deathbed, his wings beating as if he would fly to his new life in his old body.”
–Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw (a romantic Victorian novel where everyone is a dragon)
Recently I’m trying a thing where I read a bunch of books at once, and switch between them more-or-less at random. Results are mixed so far. But I’ll go ahead and post the first sentences of what I have currently open…
“No one could say he hadn’t been warned.”
–Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy
“Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase.”
–Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (this one is a fourth or fifth re-read)
“In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change.”
–Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (25th Anniversary Edition)
“The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.”
–Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
“I remember throwing away a child.”
– Kameron Hurley, The Stars are Legion
Holy crap, this next one is a long sentence. Which is very representative of the way Ada Palmer has been writing this book so far. Weird, but interesting.
“You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.”
–Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
“On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.”
–George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
No biography of Hubert de Burgh has ever been written.
From Clarence Ellis’ 1952 biography of Hubert de Burgh ;).
“These days, if you are a German, you spend your time in Purgatory before you die, in earthly suffering for all your country’s unrepented and unpunished sins, until the day when, with the aid of the prayers of the Powers–or three of them, anyway–Germany is finally purified.”
From A German Requiem, by Phillip Kerr, set in Berlin in 1947
Ooh, don’t miss the sequel!
“No one could say he hadn’t been warned. And then the murders began.”
“Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. And then the murders began.”
“In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. And then the murders began.”
“The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no. And then the murders began.”
“I remember throwing away a child. And then the murders began.”
“You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. And then the murders began.”
“On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen. And then the murders began.”
Oh, wait–wrong thread.
That’s how I normally read. It’s just too much of a hassle with a kindle to go back to the first page and then get back to the right spot, unless I’m dumb and am just not seeing how to do it easily.
‘‘Readers are like fish.’’
*Structuring Your Novel *by KM Weiland.
I can beat it:
“‘After an absence of nearly two years,’ Jefferson Davis told the legislators assembled under the golden dome of his home-state capitol on the day after Christmas, 1862–twenty months and two weeks, to the day, since the guns of Charlestown opened fire on Sumter to inaugurate the civil war no one could know was not yet halfway over–‘I again find myself among those who, from the days of my childhood, have ever been the trusted objects of my affection, those for whose good I have ever striven and whose interests I have sometimes hoped I may have contributed to subserve.’”
–From volume 2 of Shelby Foote’s 3-volume The Civil War. Actually not atypical of the kind of complex sentences Foote writes.
Too bad no one’s reading Absalom, Absalom!
“The jewel garden really began in the spring of 1981, when we started the jewellery business.”
from The Jewel Garden by Monty and Sarah Don.